Windows 7 release canadite

Update 5-May: The Release Candidate code is available for update here. Interim builds will be prepared between now and the final release for testing internally at Microsoft and externally by OEM partners.

But this is the final version that will be made publicly available before Windows 7 is released for manufacturing and sent to retail channels and OEM partners. Rumors that Microsoft is holding back a secret feature or radical change in the Windows 7 user interface are unfounded. Although it's possible that Microsoft will add some new desktop backgrounds or screen savers, what you see in the Release Candidate is what you'll get when the product is released.

Microsoft's work from now until then is in fixing the last round of bugs, most of which will be related to OEM configurations and hardware support. Back in early March, I spotlighted some of the visual changes in Windows 7 that you'll see in the Release Candidate see "A sneak peek at the Windows 7 Release Candidate".

In addition, Microsoft has announced that it will release a custom version of Virtual PC with a licensed copy of Windows XP SP3 and make the combination available as a download for licensed users of the business editions of Windows 7 Professional and up. A lot, actually. See my review "Windows 7: What to expect" and the accompanying screenshot gallery for more details.

Just as with the beta release, the public will be able to download and install this release for evaluation purposes. You can sign in using your credentials and download the RC code from those sites.

The public download site went live on May 4. You can also mount the file to a virtual drive using a program like Virtual Clone Drive. That depends. If you use the setup files as distributed, you will be blocked from upgrading over any build prior to That includes the beta release build and most leaked interim builds from April 4 or earlier. There is a workaround, however, which I'll document in a follow-up post.

The XP-to-7 upgrade path is not officially supported. Yes, with some caveats. In addition, you can upgrade only within the same processor family: Vista x86 to Windows 7 x86, and Vista x64 to Windows 7 x You cannot upgrade an x86 machine to x64 or vice-versa.

An upgrade installation preserves user accounts and passwords, Windows settings, installed programs, and data files but might replace some device-specific drivers with generic Windows 7 versions. In my tests, Vista upgrades have worked very well across the board. Virtual machines have their uses, and all of the virtualization platforms I looked at currently support Windows 7 as a guest OS. VMs are ideal for testing software compatibility and creating simulated networks.

Windows 7 cannot be installed on any drive that Windows identifies as removable. Depending on how your system is configured you might be able to install the OS on an eSATA drive, which appears to the operating system as an internal fixed drive. The release candidate image is configured to install Windows 7 Ultimate Edition. If you want to choose a different edition, copy the installation files to a different location, delete the Ei.

Most mainstream business and entertainment programs that work on Windows Vista will also work on Windows 7. Programs that are likely to fail at least until patches are available are system utilities that interact with hardware at a low level, such as disk defragmenters, and some security software.

The drivers included with the Windows 7 RC cover a very wide range of devices, and others are available through Windows Update. Some vendors have released beta versions of Windows 7 drivers. Creative Labs has released Windows 7 drivers for some devices and has announced a release schedule for others.

That depends on your hardware and the installation type. A clean installation on a fast desktop system should finish in a half-hour or less. On slower hardware, it could take up to an hour.

When performing an upgrade, you'll need to allow additional time for migrating data files and settings. I haven't seen any upgrade take more than two hours.

Technically, no. I have no stake in the success or failure of Windows 7. The crucial difference comes in how 7 feels. A standardized benchmark may have a hard time bearing this out, and benchmarks released on the internet show little difference in overall performance between Vista and 7. For the most part, this is true.

That said, 7 feels snappier in general, and this has been a pretty universal sentiment. Microsoft claims to have made improvements in the memory management of Windows 7 compared to Vista, and I believe it. The best way I can describe the difference is is surprise with a gaming analogy. That average is your absolute performance. Windows 7 feels like it gives you those extra five frames per second — or the equivalent performance boosts — with almost every application.

The odds of this being a continuing issue are very slight, and Nvidia may already have this kink worked out. In my experience, even since playing with early builds of Windows 7, the operating system has been phenomenally stable. Much more stable than Vista was for its first year in retail actually. Windows 7 is rock steady. While I love ATI, quality control seems to be sorely lacking. The first I bought had a problem with one of the power leads, and the first my friend Jon bought was just plain unstable.

So I popped his bunk out and popped my working one back in. Windows 7 had a fit trying to boot, but then something unexpected happened: on the third failed boot attempt, Windows 7 asked if I wanted to run a routine to repair it. So there you have it. I had some problems with Far Cry 2 , but I narrowed those down to a setting in my sound driver and not Windows 7 itself.

Beyond that, Far Cry 2 is frankly pretty unstable on its own no matter what you run it on. Going beyond applications, the driver situation is a simple one.