RSSFirst Windows 7 RTM code available August 6
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published July 21, 2009, 5:22 PM
In an announcement late Tuesday afternoon, Microsoft product evangelist Brandon LeBlanc did not reveal the precise date in which Windows 7 would release to manufacturing. He did state, however, that the first availability of the final code will come Thursday, August 6, for independent software and hardware vendors, and also for MSDN and TechNet subscribers (English language version only).
Volume license customers will be next to see availability the following day, if they subscribe to Software Assurance (SA), said LeBlanc. Those without an SA license must wait until September 1 to download their copies.
Gold certified partners will be next to download Windows 7 on August 16. Non-English language copies will be available on October 1. This news does mean that Microsoft's analysts' meeting scheduled for July 30 will likely be devoted to the Windows 7 RTM, which will very likely have happened by that date. OEMs will receive their copies of images for installation to new PCs beginning two days following RTM date, said LeBlanc, again without revealing the precise date.
Semantic widening at its best: this is, of course, the Windows 7 *binaries*, not the code. :)
Not that you would (usually) expect the other from Microsoft...
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|What is a binary?
Oh, right...compiled code.... ;)
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|When will average joe beta testers will be able to download it?
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|Never. This is RTM (release to manufacturing, the final product)--it's not beta anymore.
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|well, you could probably find it somewhere, via Microsoft but not directly of course, wouldn't be a bad idea to test it out on your systems before you buy 7, if you haven't already
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|That means death of endangered os--snow leopard is coming near
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|Only in your dreams.
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|I just gotta ask....
What's so "endangered" about it?
Just like Win7 on Windows PCs, Snow Leopard\ wi'll ship with all new Apple PCs. Mac sales may be down a bit, but they've always wavered between 5%-10% of the market and they're just fine with that (in fact, I believe they prefer it that way).
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|the next thing alot of folks are whining about is Why aren't all tiers of testers getting something out of this deal? well, you get to use Windows 7 RC until March 2010, long after Windows 7 is released to the public... Oct 22nd
i tested 7 beta/RC, i'm one of them lowly consumers and you won't see me crying about not getting anything because i reported bugs, lol i get to keep using the RC, until my pre-order arrives
and to those that are disappointed because they didn't pre-prder during the half off deals, those who figured they would get a copy free or some kind of heavy discount? please, lets lose the entitlement attitude... MS asked you to help out, you did, nobody forced you into that and you can't get into something and always expect something in return
well we're all getting a little something, finally a good OS that was promised years back
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|Huh...
All of these dates are a tad prior to the "September 1st" date Mr. Wilcox was rambling on about in one of his "Why Microsoft sucks..." tirades.
I'm sure he figures this happened because Microsoft was listening to him... ;)
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|Well, I think there was an assumption going around, once the September 1 volume license date was revealed, that _that was it_; the gates would be lifted on that date. And I actually read stories going around saying that Microsoft had revealed the RTM date to be 9/1. (Let me tell you: imaging, shipment, receipt by OEMs, and installation all on the same day...What wonders will come next?)
Now, I've been talking to Microsoft's people for the past few weeks almost non-stop, and the story I've been hearing from them is, there's no delay, there's no delay. And guess what, there's no delay. Contrast this against this time three years ago, when what I was hearing about Vista was, there's no delay, we think there's no delay, everything's "on track" for whenever things are supposed to be released, no comment, can't talk to you now, why do you keep asking the same questions...Guess what, there's a delay.
That aside, it amazes me how folks who report about this industry in publications everywhere don't quite understand the modern manufacturing process, they confuse "General Availability" with RTM, and when the results conflict with their own incorrect math, they scream, "Delay!" Granted, we still don't know the exact RTM date, but it absolutely has to be prior to 7/31. And that signals to me that this process really is going smoothly. Frankly, I think we're past the "abort stage" anyway -- it's too _late_ to delay the shipment process, and if it were to happen at all, it would have to have been no later than the end of May.
-SF "Though I'm Sure Someone Out There Will Find Some Way to Cast Microsoft as the Villain and Themselves the Victim Anyway" 3
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|What really sucks?
I grabbed build 7600 online....and it's slower than the RC...which was just noticeably slower than the Beta. I could have *sworn* things like "removing the debug code" and such were supposed to *improve* performance...
No benchmarks...just "Feel" stuff. Takes longer to boot, takes longer for the desktop to become active (was instant on the Beta), firefox takes longer to load (though that was an older version...)
Yeah...it's starting to lose it's blush, suddenly. Leave it to MSFT...
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|I upgraded my RC1 to build 7600 yesterday and suffered no performance hits, no improvements but no loss either.
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|"Upgraded"?
Last I checked 7600 was full install only, regarding previous builds of Win 7...
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|I am not feeling any difference in speed since the beta...Are you using the exact same drivers?
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|I am using the drivers that come with the OS..no downloaded versions (just updated via WU).
...admittedly, this is on a bottom of the line laptop regarding requirements, an HP ZE2113 with the RAM upgraded to 1GB, but...
Desktop was instantly accessible, FF launched quickly...now it's a 10-15 second wait for the desktop and same for FF.
Haven't noticed any difference on my desktop or my wife's laptop (other than Firefox...which leads me to believe it's a 3.5.x issue).
Still, I was expecting it to get faster between builds...and even "not noticing a difference" is odd considering the debug code removal/supposed optimization.
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|hmm, FF 3.5 on my Acer Aspire 5630, 1.6 core2duo 1gb ram loads in probably 1 second, which i don't consider that horrible, considering the EIDE slow a** hdd it has lol but yes, recently Firefox did have some speed/loading issue... it hadn't affected me but they they fixed it for some.
keep history clear, disable awesomebar functions... use a little fix to speed up the sqlite databases the browser loads... see if anything helps:)
then again i guess if the full windows version runs decently on 1+ghz 1gb ram, thats not bad, if someone is running anything less they shouldn't be allowed to complain at this point in time lol
thats if they are even remotely serious about any sort of computing... even browsing the web these days with hd video
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|Meh...
I may drop back to 3.0.11 or some such and give that a whirl. I don't intend on disabling anything, really.
(FYI: 1.6Ghz, 1GB RAM) I wouldn't say it's running decently on 7600, but it ran pretty well on 7100 and very well on 7000.
Again, on my desktop or wife's laptop, all have run splendidly. I am assuming it's an issue of being "bottom of the line".
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