Windows 7 release candidate to be out on April 10

By: Pallab Jyotee Hazarika

Various internet leaks speculates the first proper release candidate of Windows 7 out on 10th April for download.

We have heard so many rumors and speculations about the newest Windows OS – the seventh in line (and so is the name), that it has almost become a non-starter now. But some good news may be around the bend finally. A rumor I’ve seen on this blog called Neowin.net that says that the official release date of the release candidate of Windows 7 "is set for April 10, 2009. The Windows team is right on schedule with development, and if there are no significant problems over the next few weeks the April 10, 2009 release date will remain intact.”

Steven Sinofsky, Microsoft Senior Vice President of Windows, mentioned during an email conversation with Paul of Geeksmack that, "Recently we've seen people talk about 'RC Builds' and the like. First, all builds since the beta are RC builds since by definition that is the next milestone. But by far the most humorous element has been that the build numbers blogged about are higher than our current build. Today's build is 7046, but it hasn't completed yet :-)."

However a later conversation with Emil Protalinski of ars technical, Sinofsky mentioned that "The build will be available broadly."

It was speculated originally that the release candidate will come out at the end of this month I.e., February, but the half-a-million feedbacks held them back. Microsoft apparently decided this time around to give the feedbacks a reasonable consideration, and so they probably had to postpone the date to the second week of April. It is not confirmed whether the company will launch the product worldwide or in US only at first.

Microsoft started making the Beta version of this OS available for download on January 10^th and due to popular demand, extended the deadline twice to end the download access on 12^th of this month.

Release candidate:

A release candidate is a feature-complete build of a piece of software that has reached its final stages of development. It's released to testers as the version that could be sold in stores, with the intention of ironing out any final bugs before hitting shelves. (Cnet)