Topic: Windows 7 RC1 available for download Tuesday

[jeff]

For you Windows 7 beta testers (and even those of you that didn't), Release Candidate 1 will be available for public download this week.

Welcome to the Windows 7 Beta Customer Preview Program

Windows 7 Release Candidate Announcement

Effective April 30, the Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) will be available to MSDN subscribers and TechNet Plus subscribers.

On Tuesday, May 5 (PST), the RC will be available to everyone via our Customer Preview Program. As with the Beta, the Windows 7 RC Customer Preview Program is a broad public program that offers the RC free to anyone who wants to download it. It will be available at least through June 30, 2009, with no limits on the number of downloads or product keys available.

So you don’t need rush to make sure you get your copy. When you’re ready to download the RC, it’ll be waiting for you.

Windows 7 Beta downloads are no longer available. However, you can still register for a product key or look up the key you’ve already gotten.

Windows 7 is…
the next release of the Windows client operating system, built on the secure foundation of Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. Performance, reliability, security, and compatibility are core tenets of this release as we collect your feedback to meet our engineering goals of making Windows 7 the best-performing and most stable Windows operating system to date. New innovations in the product are designed to augment your ability as an IT professional to better provision and manage increasingly mobile PCs, protect data, and improve both end-user and personal productivity.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/dd353205.aspx?ITPID=carepgm

[Sparks]

Thanks Jeff , going to install it on my second hd. Still have my beta key

[jeff]

You don't want the Beta key. You'll get a new key on Tuesday.

[Smonkey]

So if it expires June 2010, you think we wont be seeing the finnished version untill at least after June 2010?

[jeff]

No, they're saying it should be around January.

Downloading x86 and x64 versions right now...

[Smonkey]

No, they're saying it should be around January.

Downloading x86 and x64 versions right now...

A little after I asked this someone told me Acer spilled the beans about an earlier release date.
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2009/05/01/acer-spills-windows-7-release-date/1

[Sipin]

Installed the 64bit on my laptop today.

Have 2 more keys. Will do my home PC this week...

[DeathDealer]

How long has it been taking to download.  When I looked at it today it said something like 26 hours.  Thats gota be wrong.

[Sipin]

I downloaded it this morning in like 20min's.

[Sparks]

Installed on my second hard drive on desktop. Like the option to duel boot menu systems now with vista and win 7 on 2 seperate drives. Pretty clean install.

[Grendel]

Can anybody point me to a tutorial on how you partition a drive to run W7?  I'm downloading now, but without a "how-to" it'll be a paperweight for me.

[Smonkey]

Can anybody point me to a tutorial on how you partition a drive to run W7?  I'm downloading now, but without a "how-to" it'll be a paperweight for me.

Heres how to dual boot W7 from VISTA, with pictures!
http://www.overclock.net/hard-drives-storage/441124-how-create-partition-vista-w7-dual.html

[jeff]

Gren - if you haven't done it already, have a unformatted partition already. When you run the Win7 install, it will ask you where you want it installed. Pick that large unformatted partition. The installer will want to create a 100MB partition and then use the remaining for the OS. The 100MB partition is something new with Win7.

[Grendel]

Thanks for the link, Smonkey.

Jeff, if you're saying that Win 7 will create a partition on install anyway, I'm all over that.  Is that what you're saying?

[MistaObvious]

You can do it that way, but it might be safer to make sure the partition is already there before hand to make sure you don't accidentally lose data from the original install.  In theory this won't happen, but I've seen stranger things happen.