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What’s in the Windows 7 Release Candidate?

Elena Santos

Elena Santos

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The Windows 7 team made it official a couple of days ago: the first Release Candidate of Windows 7 will be available for downloading and testing on May 5th. That’s only a few days away, so it’s time to take a deeper look and see what this RC may include and if there are any changes comparing to the previous Beta.

 Windows 7 Release Candidate

According to the developers working on Windows 7, the beta period and all the testers involved in it have been a great help for fixing bugs and improving the overall performance in Microsoft’s new operating system. At some point during this period, they were receiving a new feedback report every 15 seconds! All these suggestions have contributed to tweak and fine tune the Windows 7 taskbar and desktop, the Aero Peek function and the new version of Windows Media Player, among others. You can read more about all these changes in these two posts published on the Engineering Windows 7 blog.

Another interesting feature in Windows 7 RC we heard about is the so called Windows XP mode. In Paul Thurrott‘s words, this Windows XP mode is a virtualized version of Windows XP SP3 that will run inside Microsoft’s Virtual PC framework and which will allow Windows 7 users to keep on using XP-only apps. This functionality won’t be built in the Windows 7 Release Candidate, but rather be offered as a separate download for RC users and eventually, Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate users. The idea sounds fine to me, but I’d need to see how smoothly this virtual XP can run inside another operating system.

Now, what about expiration dates? The Beta version was available for download for a whole month, which makes me think that this RC is likely to be available until June 2009 and will last for a few months. Rumor has it that the final version of Windows 7 will be released in October. In any case don’t wait until the last day and be sure to get your copy on May 5th. We are looking forward to hearing your impressions!

Elena Santos

Elena Santos

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