BleepingComputer.com: Windows 7 Release Candidate goes public today!

This week Microsoft announced that a Release Candidate version of Windows 7 had become available for subscribers of MSDN and TechNet for testing. Today, Windows 7 goes global, with availability for anyone who wants to take this sleek new version of Windows for a ride.

Today, May 5th 2009, Microsoft will make the Release Candidate available for download from the Windows 7 site linked below to anyone who wants to test it. This version is a full-featured edition, similar to the Ultimate version of Windows Vista. Some of the major changes and new features include:

• Prompting whenever the User Account Control level is changed. There were quite a few blog posts in the past about how not being notified when UAC is changed can be a security risk. Whether or not this aspect of UAC was changed because of these posts, I leave up to you.
  
  
• NO MORE AUTORUN FOR NON-OPTICAL DRIVES! This is a big one for security nuts as autorun will no longer be enabled for devices such as external hard drives and USB drives, but only for optical media such as DVDs and CDs. This is a huge security hole that has now been eliminated and should severely reduce the spread of removable media infections.
  
  
• More functionality in Thumbnail Overflow Lists. These lists are created when you have significant amounts of windows of the same program open. Now these lists allow you to close windows directly from the list or get sneak peeks of the window by hovering your mouse over one.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Further optimization of Windows Touch and Gestures. A gesture guide can be seen below:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Refinements and modifications to Windows Media Player features. These include the new Now Playing mini-player that shows the current song and its album art, support for most .MOV files created by digital cameras, and a new significant enhancement called Remote Media Streaming. Remote Media Streaming allows you to access your digital library over the Internet from any other Windows 7 based computer outside of the home. We will provide more information about this feature in later articles.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Windows XP Mode is a downloadable add-on that allows you to run older Windows XP files that do not run properly in Windows 7. It does this by creating a virtual PC running the Windows XP operating system. Using this Virtual PC, you can now launch any legacy Windows XP applications. Even nicer is the fact that the running XP program will appear as a normal program running from your Windows 7 desktop, rather than one running in a Virtual Machine. I will be providing in-depth coverage of this feature and how to use it in the near future.
  

All-in-all there are a lot of new, exciting, and fun features in the Windows 7 Release Candidate and I hope to bring you in-depth coverage of them in the near future. So stay tuned for some more articles coming soon.

Whoosh - now I have to get another lappy so I can play too.

It is available now to download:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/download.aspx

Beautiful, but look at this:

Quote

Not surprised...this is a trial/beta..not a free copy

Besides from the new few extras is this a critical download for beta testers. I hate formatting and reinstalling.

I dont know if its critical unless you want to play with the new toys and possibly receive better performance.

Will give it a shot this weekend

@Sneakycyber

You can update without reformatting if you like. It requires a simple edit of a config file.

Steps:
1) Copy the ISO to your hard drive (which presumably since you downloaded it, it is already there).
2) Open the 'sources' directory, and find a file called 'cversion'. Change the line MinClient = 7077.0 to MinClient = 7000.0, then save it. Then just run the update from the image on your hard drive.


Why you shouldn't do this: Since this is a release candidate, Microsoft is still testing installation on as many configurations as possible. By bypassing the full setup. you are not allowing for the opportunity to test a clean install with your particular configuration. There is also a chance that this may not work, but has worked on two of my systems so far. The reason that I elected to go the upgrade route is that it takes me weeks to get my systems all completely reconfigured and all of my development stuff reinstalled.

groovicus, on May 9 2009, 12:46 PM, said:

I'm very interested! I would love to find out more inforamtion related to this topic. Thanks in advance.
me too, I need more detailed info

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This post has been edited by Maria2009: 05 August 2009 - 08:36 PM