Windows 7 RC1 Shooting for April 10 Release?

By Jane McEntegart
published

Those of you who’ve been watching the rumors regarding a release date for Windows 7 RC1 will be disappointed to hear the latest, which apparently comes from a trusted source within Microsoft.

Given that it's the next milestone, people have been talking about a Windows 7 release candidate ever since the public beta came offline a couple of weeks back. According to Neowin.net, a trusted source within the Redmond company told the publication that while the release candidate was currently being tested internally, it wouldn’t be released until April 10, which is a longer wait than the falsely rumored February 27 date that has been doing the rounds over the last week or so.

“At this time, Windows 7 RC is internally being tested and the official release date is set for April 10, 2009,” writes Sean Bradford at Neowin. “The Windows team is right on schedule with development, and if there are no significant problems over the next few weeks the April 10, 2009 release date will remain in tact,” he continued.

The post is scant with regards to details so there’s no way of knowing if April 10 will see a world-wide release or if that date applies only to TechNet and MSDN users (who we’re assuming will receive the build first). However, Ars Technica reports that when asked, Steven Sinofsky senior vice president for the Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group, said that Microsoft Connect testers as well as MSDN and TechNet subscribers would not get the RC exclusively. Ars reports that Sinofsky said no: "The build will be available broadly."

Jane McEntegart
20 Comments Comment from the forums
  • jsloan
    why dont they shoot for april fools day, because that is all windows 7 is, lipstick on the vista pig, and we need to bring our stock price up, so we need to get new money in, so we have to get our customers to buy vista all over again.
    Reply
  • bustapr
    I haven't tried windows 7 yet,but Judging from other reviews and comments of it, it sounds like remodled Windows vista.I hope its not true. Besides , april 10 isn't all that far away you bunch of winers.
    Reply
  • bustapr
    looks like people wont fall for the mojave joke again. LOL
    Reply
  • JMcEntegart
    bustaprlooks like people wont fall for the mojave joke again. LOL
    Lawl
    Reply
  • jhansonxi
    “At this time, Windows 7 RC is internally being tested and the official release date is set for April 10, 2009,” writes Sean Bradford at Neowin. “The Windows team is right on schedule with development, and if there are no significant problems over the next few weeks the April 10, 2009 release date will remain in tact,” he continued."

    As I posted in the "Microsoft Testing Windows 7 Updater" article I just spent a week testing the 64-bit beta and it has a lot of stability and design problems. It's better than Vista but it's more of a buggy service pack for Vista than a new release. I don't expect them to delay the release however as they need the money and bugs haven't stopped them from releasing past versions.
    Reply
  • jsloan
    i wonder how well it runs visual studio, office, games? or will they have to releases patches to these or whole new versions.

    when vista came out visual studio users had issues...
    Reply
  • AndyYankee17
    this is not a rebranded vista, you guys are morons, 98% of the code in an OS is not what you see, it's all under the hood improvements. if you judge OSes by what you see just install a vista theme for XP
    Reply
  • hellwig
    AndyYankee17if you judge OSes by what you see just install a vista theme for XPTrue, but that's what Microsoft uses to reel-in the suckers. Why didn't they release DirectX 10 and Aero for XP? They needed flashy eye-candy to increase sales.

    Once a stable version of 7 appears, and we can compare things like games, productivety software, etc... between Vista and Windows 7, hopefully people will see the difference (and hopefully, Windows 7 vastly outperforms Vista).

    On an unrelated topic, what's with the 7's recently? Windows long ago abandoned numbers, but went back to 7 for the 7th Windows OS? Intel dropped the Pentium name as its flagship, but named what would have been the 7th pentium generation the Core i7? Are poeople really that superstitious they'll include a lucky 7 in their product name?
    Reply
  • gnesterenko
    Been testing build 7000, the x64 version, for about a month now and I've trashed my Vista install - no reason for it - 7000 is faster and more stable. No compatibility issues.. ok wait there was one, the first beta driver from ATI had trouble installing, but a workaround was easy to find on google and even easier to implement (basically had to change the install path from default). WIth the new Catalyst 9.1, that problem has been fixed as well, even though 9.1 isn't officially supported for WIndows 7. But yea, absolutely no complaints against 7. Everything is smooth, responsive, and stable.

    Also tested it with Acronis True Image. I had a lot of trouble with using Acronis with Vista, restores were not reliable - specifically would get driver corruption issues post-restore. All problems gone with 7. Used the Acronis boot cd to create the image on a second drive (not a deticated partition either, just a file on the drive). Restored the system to perfect use as if nothing had happened - what imaging software should do! Don't know what the issue with Vista was, and at this point, don't care at all.

    Overclocking stability is also slightly better then Vista in build 7000, was able to squeeze out about 100 extra MHz. So really erally looking forward to RC1 and final release to get even better numbers. And this is all running on an old nForce4 mobo with an AMD X2 4400+ OCed currently to 2.6GHz(ish) each and Value Select Corsair DDR 400 memory. We're talking 4 year old tech at best. (An no, the memory cannot be overclocked, have to divide WAY down to achieve stability)

    "The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
    Reply
  • E7130
    AndyYankee17this is not a rebranded vista, you guys are morons, 98% of the code in an OS is not what you see, it's all under the hood improvements. if you judge OSes by what you see just install a vista theme for XP
    Correct, most will just see a refreshed GUI, but not understand the code development that went into the OS. The GUI is that last thing they work on, they make slight skin changes, but still may look different from today's Windows 7.
    Reply