for programs such as MacWindows, while the Irish Times would later write that certain groups of consumers "were suspicious as to how a little-known Hawaii-based outfit... could suddenly do something that had evaded much larger firms." In explaining the suspicion, Ars Technica later noted that emulators by small developers like PearPC had reputations for working extremely slowly, meaning CherryOS's claim of operating 80 percent of the host PC's speed would have been "a major breakthrough" in the industry. When asked by the Star Bulletin, at this point Kryeziu denied any possibility that CherryOS would contain code from a rival program like Apple, MacWindows, Emulators.com, or PearPC, stating that "our lawyers have looked at this and say we're in the clear. We wrote this from scratch and we're clean as a whistle." According to the Star Bulletin, suspicions that CherryOS might be a hoax "were fanned" by glitches on the CherryOS home website, and three days after the site opened for pre-sales it crashed after taking 300,000 daily hits. MXS president Jim Kartes crediting the crash on both unexpected high traffic and Mac "purists" who had hacked and destroyed the servers, and though MXS continued to accept non-digital pre-orders, by October 19 the CherryOS website was offline entirely as MXS switched to a new web host. Pre-release version Initially the company did not offer a trial version of CherryOS, citing concerns the code might be pirated. However, "as a direct result of the overwhelming response to our October 12 announcement," as of October 15 the company was readying a free beta version with a projected release date of November 25, 2004. On October 18, Kryeziu stated that a free public demo would be released within a week, and CherryOS was first registered to be trademarked in the United States on October 19, 2004. On October 19, however, Kryeziu withheld a timetable for the CherryOS release, stating the company had been pre-emptive in releasing the earlier "soft launch" version, and that CherryOS still had too many software bugs to predict a release date. Wired News reviewed a pre-release version around this time, reporting on October 22 that an expert had found distinguishing "watermarks" from PearPC's source code in CherryOS. Moreover, the pre-release version was reviewed to run at the same slow speed as PearPC, though Wired noted "they've actually done some work on it. They've written a whole graphical interface that makes