Windows 7 Release Candidate - Download Now

For those of us who jumped into Vista relatively early and had the distinct feeling of being Beta Testers who paid for the privilege, we have been looking forward to the "fix" from Microsoft. It was clear early on that Microsoft had a buggy product and SP1 came out pretty fast but rumors started swirling about a new OS on the horizon. From late 2008 the rumors got loud and then in Jan 2009 it was announced that a Windows 7 Beta was available. Since then the reviews have been positive about the performance and it was clear the Redmond was determined to get it out in 2009 which was probably a year earlier than originally forecast.

Now with the RC available for download by everyone starting May 5th or MSDN subscribers starting April 29th it looks like Microsoft is ready to start giving code to system builders to get them ready. (Yes - my download is already running and will soon be running on a virtual machine)

After running Vista Business for 18 months and seeing a variety of weird hang-ups and bugs I have to say that if my RC candidate install goes well then I won't be waiting to upgrade to Win 7 when it is formally released for sale.

One major gripe that I have and it appears that MS will go through with is the number of versions and SKUs they will be releasing. Current rumors are that there are 5 SKUs released for Win 7 and that painfully reminds me of the mess they made of all the versions in Vista.

(CAN WE PLEASE JUST HAVE 2 VERSIONS?? HOME AND PROFESSIONAL)

-SP