Windows 7 RTM July 2009, General Availability October 22, 2009

By Doug Holland (Intel) (233 posts) on June 2, 2009 at 1:54 pm


Microsoft has announced that Windows 7 will RTM next month and the final build should be with select partners towards the end of July. MSDN and TechNet subscribers should be among the first to be able to download the final bits although no date has been specified for when subscribers will have access.

General availability will then be on October 22nd 2009 which would allow manufacturers such as Dell and HP to make Windows 7 available on PC's for Christmas.

While Windows 7 has definitely received more press than its big brother, Windows Server 2008 R2, the next release of Microsoft's server platform should not be ignored. Windows Server 2008 R2 includes many enhancements that will make it attractive for the server and workstation markets. Both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 support up to 256 logical processors and the virtualization experience with Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2 is greatly improved. Windows Server 2008 R2 will achieve RTM and GA at the same time as the Windows 7 client.

Since the PDC last year, I have been running both Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 in a dual boot configuration and the experience has been awesome. On both my personal laptop and workstation I have been running those operating systems exclusively and have had almost no issues even with the PDC build. With the beta and the RC builds, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 have evolved into truly reliable operating systems.

If you're still using either Windows XP or Windows Vista then I would definitely suggest you take a good look Windows 7 even if you're using XP generation hardware. Performance benchmarks seem to indicate that the Windows 7 beta and RC builds outperform both Windows XP and Windows Vista.

While I would also advise you to take a serious look at Windows Server 2008 R2 you should be aware that this is the first operating system from Microsoft that has been compiled only for in 64-bit. It will be interesting to see if Windows 7 will be the last operating system that Microsoft makes available in both 32-bit and 64-bit editions.

Categories: Parallel Prog. & Multi-Core, Software Engineering

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