Microsoft names Windows 7 RC1 dates
Two-week wave
Stable and completed code for Windows 7 will be released to early adopters during the coming week, with mass availability planned for the following Tuesday.
The eagerly awaited Windows 7 Release Candidate 1 will be posted to members of Microsoft's Developer Network and TechNet for download on April 30. RC1 will be made generally available on May 5, Microsoft said late Friday.
Microsoft confirmed the dates after the RC leaked to four torrent sites, causing excitement and frustration that Microsoft didn't appear to be offering a date for release.
This is expected to be the last code cut before Windows 7 is delivered as final product, unless major bugs or faults are uncovered. Microsoft pointedly did not give a date for Windows 7's release to manufacturing when it announced the RC and has been clinging to a 2010 time frame.
The smart money, though, is on release to manufacturing and OEMs this year, as early as this summer. Consumers are expected to get Windows 7 on new PCs and as boxed product in time for the back-to-school shopping window starting in September and October or the holiday shopping season a little later.
Businesses on Microsoft's enterprise accounts are likely to get a slightly earlier lead-time on the new operating system.
Windows XP, the predecessor to Windows Vista, officially launched in October 2001 - in good time for the holiday shopping season - while Windows Vista was delivered to consumers in the fallow, post-holiday shopping period of a February - a fact that meant a disappointing start to sales.
Windows 7 has been pretty much completed from a usability perspective for a while, with people already using the operating system at work.
Windows Experience blogger Brandon LeBlanc said changes since January's beta included bug fixes and improvements to the overall "experience," He pointed to refinements in the new taskbar, the behavior of Aero Peek, Touch, and Windows Media Player. You can see what changed between the beta and RC here and here. ®
COMMENTS
well
"MS are really in touch with what people want from their OSs. I wish I were being sarcastic..."
Actually they are, the general users want these kind of features, but they can't please 100% of the people so they would rather please 99% of the market than 1% (considing i have a feeling you as part of that 1% probably wouldn't use anythign ms produced even if it was the best thign in the world)
get an idea of market segments please.
@Jonathan Schofield
"Also the RAM runs at 60 - 80 % even when nothing is open."
This is a *feature* of advanced OSen, not a problem. RAM is faster than disk, so cache and buffers for most-accessed data is a better thing than oodles of RAM sat inactive. BSD does this too, and prompts the same question on the mailing lists time after time. What you need to do is test your apps and check the paging, not criticise the initial memory allocation. A good OS will swap very little until it runs out of physical memory, abandoning its buffers in favour of currently active data instead of paging them out. In my experience 7 does this well, as does BSD. It's such a recurring question that it merited a FAQ:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/misc.html#TOP-FREEMEM
Not a fault of Microsoft. They're following best practice in this instance.
Oh dear, we are all getting in a tizz about it.
Nice to see some being objective about it.
For me, if it runs ok and connects to Terminal Services the users can have it, we are only about 150 users and eveything they need apart from Outlook is Terminal Services hosted. I know not everyone runs like that but seriously if you think that one OS mistake will mean mass uptake of Linux you are not really living in the free world.
Most of the users in the business I work for can just about use Windows, and I mean that like they don't know how to create shortcut or sitting and logging on another doesn't mean all your stuff will work. So it looks like we will be Windows for quite a while, anything else would blow their minds!
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