Microsoft: Windows 7 on October 22

Until there’s a press release on the Microsoft website, the speculation and analysis will continue. A recent news report has a Microsoft executive committing to a hard date.

“We feel confident that we will deliver Windows 7 with our partners on Oct. 22,” Bill Veghte, senior vice president for Microsoft's Windows business, said to Dow Jones.

That’s the best piece of information we have yet regarding Windows 7’s release date, which also falls right in line with what we’ve heard before from Acer.

Of course, that could just mean that Windows 7 will hit RTM (release to manufacturing) on that date, except Dow Jones’ headline read, “Microsoft: Windows 7 To Be Generally Available Oct 22.”

Microsoft then later clarified to Gizmodo, “General Availability (GA) is when consumers can actually purchase the software and PCs with the software preinstalled.”

This, along with all the guesses pointing at October, seems to indicate that Windows 7 will be out well in time for the holiday shopping season.

Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
  • drunknmunkys
    RC still valid until March 09?
    Reply
  • drunknmunkys
    10*
    Reply
  • starhoof
    I cant wait ! because my rig will be finished right arround same time, now that i know the date i can hold off with bying OS, since i thought it will be near end of the year.
    Reply
  • justjc
    RC is valid until June 1 2010, however after March 1 2010 it starts shutting down every two hours(as mentioned in the Exploring Windows: Special Beta Edition -- Correction email sent to testers)
    Reply
  • doomtomb
    Dell told us this first
    Reply
  • coopchennick
    starhoofI cant wait ! because my rig will be finished right arround same time, now that i know the date i can hold off with bying OS, since i thought it will be near end of the year.Just use the RC if you get the hardware together before then
    Reply
  • Tindytim
    Jeez, I'm going to have a bunch of OSes installed on my system, Karmic Koala (Ubuntu 9.10) comes out in October, and I usually do a fresh install to test it before getting rid of the older distro. I guess I'll just get rid of all my Windows partitions for Windows 7 Ultimate.
    Reply
  • themike
    It took me a firmware update for my asus xonar dx sound card, but my Windows 7 is running great and I'm not booting my xp or vista anymore. Can't wait till final, this while GPU acceleration and better hyperthreading is gonna be great!
    Reply
  • archange
    Decent OS. Kind of the first to actually drive system requirements down for a change... Which gets my thumbs up.

    RC is running decently on my HTPC, which is NOT at all top notch. I'd install it on my Vista x64 gaming rig too, if I weren't that lazy :) Guess it'll have to do, until the RTM becomes available.

    My notebook has Ubuntu 9.04 all over it though.
    Reply
  • sublifer
    Yay! but still not sure if I want to spend the money buying it.
    Reply