Microsoft on Friday confirmed it will issue no more beta releases of Windows 7 and will instead move directly to a single release candidate (RC) and then the final release. The company offered no guidance on when we can expect the Windows 7 release, however.

“The next milestone for the development of Windows 7 is the Release Candidate or ‘RC,’” Microsoft senior vice president Steven Sinofsky confirmed in a blog post. “We’ve released the feature complete Beta and have made it available broadly around the world. The path to Release Candidate is all about getting the product to a known and shippable state both from an internal and external standpoint.”

Sinofsky notes that the RC version of Windows 7 will be “Windows 7 as Microsoft intends to ship it” and will place the OS on a fast track towards RTM (release to manufacturing), when the code is literally completed, and general availability (GA), when it is made available to the public. No timeline for the RC, RTM, or GA were provided. “The answer [to the schedule questions] is forthcoming,” Sinofsky added.

“We are taking a quality-based approach to completing the product and won’t be driven by imposed deadlines,” Sinofsky claimed. “We’re promising to deliver the best release of Windows we possibly can and that’s our goal. Together, and with a little bit more patience, we’ll achieve that goal.”

It’s pretty clear that Windows 7 will, in fact, be delivered well before the 2009 holiday and back-to-school seasons, which are key sales bump periods in the consumer market. Insiders Expect to see the RC version of Windows 7 in April alongside Windows Vista Service Pack 2 (SP2), and the RTM release by mid-2009.

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Windows 7 Beta 1 has shown up on the Internet on various download sites and peer-to-peer sharing location and many are beginning to suspect that this “mostly complete” beta of the next latest and greatest version of Windows was leaked by Microsoft themselves!  And this makes sense.  After all there are problems, features, and issues that never show up in beta releases until released and subjected to the wide variety of hardware and software combinations.

I was able to get my hands on a version of the Windows 7 Ultimate beta.  It’s running as a virtual machine on my Mac and I must say that with what little testing I have done it does appear to be faster than Vista which was one of the main complaints.  Even with only 512 mb of ram allocated it runs fairly well and in some cases better than my copy of Windows XP Pro running with 512 mb ram.  Disk activity is an issue and certainly affects performance expecially on my Macbook with only a 5400 rpm drive.  I am almost certain at this point that I’m going to buy and install a 7200 rpm 320 gb drive for the Macbook but that is another story.  This may be a biased report because Windows Glass (Aero) is not supported under VMWare fusion 1.1 officially and even though I’m running 2.0 (the latest version) it still doesn’t work. more…

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