Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Windows 7 RC is now available!

Many of you probably know that the Release Candidate version of Windows 7 is now available. You can easily download it until July 2009, so you have plenty of time. The RC expires on June 1, 2010, however, it will be shutting down bi-hourly (every 2 hours) starting March 1, 2010. You will get an alert 2 weeks before this occurs. Read about the installation here.

Microsoft Windows 7 Home Page

To receive your product key, click here, then scroll down and select the appropriate info. Then log into your Windows Live Account, fill out the application (if you haven't already done so in other places) to get your product key. Or you can just get the list of keys here, since there is only a limited number of keys meaning everyone is basically getting the same keys, just like with the beta in January 2009.

But for those of you that don't want to use an ActiveX Control to download here are some direct download links from Microsoft. These DO support Download Accelerators, so you can perform multi-part downloads. Use these links to download if you do not wish to use the ActiveX Downloader and/or wish to use other browsers (other than IE) and/or Download Accelerators.

Download 32-bit (x86) Windows 7 RC:
English
German
Japanese
Spanish
French

Download 64-bit (x64) Windows 7 RC:
English
German
Japanese
Spanish
French

Note: Occasionally, these links download a useless 110 KB ISO with the same name. If this happens, like it did to me, just try again a few times. The ISO is 2.36 GB so it may take a few hours depending on your network speed.

I am downloading the English x86 version right at this moment. Leave any comments you may have in the comments section!