Microsoft leaks Windows 7 Release Candidate availability

Jake Widman
Friday, 27 March 2009 03:48

IT Industry - Development

Microsoft's TechNet Evaluation Center -- a site offering beta and trial versions of Microsoft software for download and evaluation -- briefly displayed a page with the date May 2009 and welcoming users to Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) testing.

Rumors have been rampant about when the next version of the Windows operating system would be ready for use -- some have said as early as April 10, while others speculated that it would not be until the fall. Apparently, though, someone at Microsoft was confident that the final release candidate would be ready for widespread public testing by sometime in May -- confident enough to create a Web page describing the product and the testing period.

This page appeared on Microsoft's TechNet site -- for a few hours. (Click for larger version.)

The Web page offers the RC in 32- and 64-bit versions and in five languages and says it will require a PC with a 1GHz processor, 1 GB of system memory, and 16 GB of available disk space. The page also states that the RC will expire on June 1, 2010.

At the time of this writing, TechNet was back to advising users that Windows 7 Beta downloads are no longer available. The page that caused all the fuss can be seen here .