Microsoft presented winning partners with a total of $12,000 to bring to an end the Windows 7 partner competition at the company’s Christmas party for channel partners last night. The competition was run from mid-September to mid-October to “create awareness” for the Windows 7 launch, says Brent Colbert, Microsoft’s Director of Partner Group.“We wanted to encourage our partners to deploy Windows 7 before the October 22nd launch and to create excitement in the channel around Windows 7,” he says.Microsoft ran three Partner Organisation competitions; a small partner upgrade for partners with 5-25 PCs, the mid-sized partner upgrade for partners with 25-50 PCs, and the large partner upgrade for partners with more than 50 PCs. The small and mid-sized partners had to deploy Windows 7 on 80% of their machines, while large-sized partners had to deploy Windows 7 on 70% of their PCs.Kinetics Group Ltd won the Small Partner upgrade, and $2000, while Datasouth Business Systems took out the mid-sized partner upgrade category and Lexel Systems Ltd won the Large Partner Upgrade, both worth $5000.There were also four individual competitions for partner employees; including the ‘Low Rider’ – getting Windows 7 running on a PC, the ‘Time Warp’ – using Windows XP mode to run an old application, with the oldest running app being the winner, ‘Pimp my PC’ – Windows 7 running on a PC with the highest specifications of all entries, and ‘Home Entertainment’ – the best use of Windows 7 as a home entertainment hub. Mark Bennett of Public Technology won the ‘Low Rider’, while Mark Sanders of Elite Business Systems took out ‘Time Warp’, Scott Sutherland of Interface Technology Pimped his PC best, and Paul Spain of Gorilla Technology won the ‘Home Entertainment’ category. Colbert says the company was “really pleased” with the number of entries.“They came from all around New Zealand. We had great entries from a range of small, mid-sized and large partners.”