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Microsoft Confirms October 22 Release Date For Windows 7

Posted by Soulskill on from the pretending-to-be-surprised dept.

techwrench was one of several readers to send word that Microsoft has officially announced Windows 7 will be generally available on October 22nd. They also mentioned the Windows 7 Upgrade Option Program: "This program enables participating retailers and OEMs to offer a special deal to upgrade to Windows 7 for customers purchasing a qualifying PC. I'll be doing another blog post about this program with a date and more details when we get closer to availability. Obviously, Release To Manufacturing (RTM) is an important milestone on the path to GA. We anticipate that we'll be able to make the RTM code for Windows 7 available to our partners sometime in the 2nd half of July. We also expect to be able to make RTM code for Windows Server 2008 R2 available to our partners in this time frame as well."

2 of 182 comments (clear)

  1. Re:So? by hampton · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you work in IT, it's difficult not to care about Windows when it's 90% of the market.

  2. Not neccesarily, it is time for a new core. by spiffydudex · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I tend to agree.

    But XP is nearly 8 years old now. Yes I understand that if a software isn't broken, then don't fix it approach. (look how long windows 3.1 lasted) But the fact remains that there is software coming out that has built in native support for newer hardware types and can better take advantage of what the hardware has to offer. XP has 3 service packs that increase the ability for the operating system to fully take advantage of current hardware. Even still, XP64 doesn't fully scale to fully utilize more than a 2 core processor.
    I am not advocating that windows 7 will be all glory and shine. But I am merely expressing that as a whole the XP platform is becoming dated and should be replaced to better support emergent hardware.
    Before you start going off and saying "With Linux you don't ever see this" Wrong. When XP was released in 2001, the linux market was comprised of Redhat, Debian and Suse. From then, in 2004 Ubuntu was released. Ubuntu was a great leap in consumer level linux desktop enviroments. I would like to see people running the original Ubuntu 4.10 with only hot fixes.

    The thing I am getting at, is that no matter how much you hot fix a operating system. After some time the underlying core will have to be rebuilt.