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Following the availability of Windows 7 Beta Build 7000, Microsoft revealed that subsequent builds belonged to the Release Candidate branch. This was made obvious with releases such as 7022, 7048, 7057 and 7077, culminating with 7100 on May 5th 2009, the fully fledged RC. Applying the same set of criteria, any builds superseding 7100 are from the RTM branch. The first one offered to third-party testers outside of Redmond via Microsoft Connect is Build 7127, a release leaked and made available for download in the wild. From RC, Windows 7 will evolve straight to RTM, the software giant has confirmed.

“We shipped a release candidate, we’ve had over 1 million downloads, we can get a very good sense of whether we have made as much progress in the product, it looks as good out there as it does in our labs, and I’m pleased to announce right now that we’re going for holiday, and we’re tracking very, very well for it,” Bill Veghte, senior vice president for Windows business at Tech•Ed 2009, stated on May 11, 2009. “If you’re waiting for Windows 7, holiday broad availability, that’s what we’re tracking for. Obviously, quality is job number one, and we will hold if we think we have quality issues. But we’re tracking very, very well to holiday.”

Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president, Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group, and Jon DeVaan, senior vice president, Windows Core Operating System Division, indicated that Microsoft viewed RTM not as a point in time, but rather as a process. As Widows 7 will be released to manufacturing, the operating system will ship to PC manufacturers and will be preloaded on new machines, boxed copies will be produced for retail, and, generally, get the supply chain ready to start serving the operating system to the public. Only after the entire supply ecosystem is aligned post-RTM will the Windows 7 bits become generally available (GA).

No more functionality changes, no feature modifications going forward

In a sense, this is it for Windows 7. If you have downloaded, installed and are running Windows 7 RC Build 7100, you are essentially seeing an almost perfect approximation of the gold (RTM) development milestone. Moving onward from RC to RTM, Microsoft will not make any functionality changes to the operating system. At the same time, no extra features will be added. For the RTM, the focus will be on identifying any issues that could possibly affect the installation of the platform, security problems, and reliability and stability glitches. Tweaks will be introduced to Windows 7 to boost software and hardware compatibility and support and the updating infrastructure of the operating system will be tested. But Windows 7, as of RC, is as close to finalization as possible, with the exception of the gold build.

“It’s a phenomenal operating system. You know, I’ve been using Windows 7 on both my desktop and my laptop now for well more than six months. These guidelines, these fundamentals at the bottom of this slide where we talk about performance and reliability and compatibility have just been core fundamental concepts across the entire company as we’ve worked on Windows,” Brad Anderson, general manager, Management and Services Division, revealed at the Microsoft Management Summit, in Las Vegas, on April 29, 2009.

“I can tell you from my own personal experience, every one of my applications has just worked. I’ve not had an application that’s not working on Windows 7. The performance, I love the fact when I open up my laptop, I’m working in just a matter of seconds. To me, I take a look at this and I’m fairly critical as I look at the work that we do. And I’ve got to tell you, I love what we’ve done with Windows 7,” Anderson added.

Windows 7 Build 7127 installation
The installation process of the first RTM-branch build users got to see was of 7106, in April, 2009. In all fairness, with Build 7106 available in Chinese, many of the subtle details of the Windows 7 deployment were bound to escape end-users. Build 7127 is no different, but only because Microsoft has yet to implement any of the minute details that will scream Windows 7 RTM. In this regard, the End User License Agreement of Build 7127 still refers to the Release Candidate of the operating system. The EULA also labels the release as Win7_RC.1_Ult_NRL_en-US. Microsoft used a similar approach in the early Windows 7 RC-branch builds such as 7022, when all mentions still pointed to the Beta Build.
Windows 7 Build 7127 is one of the interim development milestones of the next iteration of Windows, and, in this sense, a step on the way to RTM. There will undoubtedly be some testers that won’t be able to stick to Windows 7 Build 7100 with Build 7127 available. But, fact is that the latest snapshot of Windows Vista’s successor will not satisfy the hunger to see more from Windows 7. It simply won’t.

And going forward, any changes, as minor as they will be, are bound to focus under-the-hood of the operating system. Microsoft is perfecting Windows 7 for general availability (GA) and is doing nothing more than to soften the rough corners of the platform. The RTM and GA milestones are ultimately dependent on quality as the main factor. Just an example of Microsoft working to avoid repeating the mistakes done with Windows Vista. One illustrative example in this regard is the effort poured into ensuring software and hardware compatibility with Windows 7.

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