I thought I should post a short blog entry about the upcoming release candidate for Windows 7. The Windows 7 RC will indeed be available publicly on May 5. TechNet/MSDN will get it April 30. The release dates are now confirmed by Microsoft, and means that I will get access to build on Thursday. 

Sadly the build is already leaked on various Bittorrent networks, and I would strongly recommend that you don’t download any software from torrent network. The risks are big, as you might end up installing the OS with both botnet clients, rootkits and trojan horse. Hackers will then have free access to your computer and can use it to attack other computers on the net.

This lately happened also on the Mac platform, where users downloaded iWork from bittorrent and didn’t know what they installed a long with the office package.

Biggest news with the RC build must be the inclusion of virtualized Windows XP coming to Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate users. Reminds me very much of the early days of MacOS X, with MacOS 9 running virtualized. Well, I didn’t need MacOS 9 back then and I guess I will not need Windows XP either. Managed to move pretty fast over to Windows Vista and have been running the public beta of Windows 7 on two machines for months without problems.

I loved the header of the this post over at Guardian: The secret ingredient in Windows 7 is … Windows XP