On May 5th, general users will have access to an entire year of Microsoft’s brand new operating system, Windows 7 RC, for free! It is already available to download for MSDN and TechNet subscribers. This version is only the Release Candidate and will expire June 1, 2010. The Release Candidate is merely the near finished product and is basically the final stage in testing. It’s supposed to have all the features of the final version. We don’t know when the final version will be released but rumors say it’ll be either late 2009 or early 2010. A beta version of Windows 7 was released some time ago, and from using it for a short time, I can gather that it was much faster and more friendly than Windows Vista. Indeed for those of you who hated Vista, Windows 7 is Vista done right. Windows 7 boasts a lot of new features including a new taskbar, libraries, jump lists, etc. Windows 7 will also come packaged with the newest Internet Explorer (IE8). The biggest improvement with Windows 7 is the performance. It will no longer take 5-10 minutes to boot up your machine. Windows 7 now has a much faster startup time, beating out both Vista and XP. We will also see a new feature called Windows XP mode which lets you run native XP programs on your machine. People are saying good things about this Windows. Microsoft hopes it will make up for all the bad things about its previous version. I’ve heard news about IT developers leap-frogging Vista and going straight to 7 in their companies. Personally I didn’t mind Vista all that much (except when it first came out). Vista now is much more supported than it was when it was released. Once you figure out how to use it, its not that bad (of course, that’s fail on Microsoft for making me waste a lot of time learning it in the first place). Either way I’m excited to make the change to Windows 7 and will definitely be there to help crash Microsoft’s website on May 5th (did anyone try to download the beta? the site went down for several hours). Zompire Dracularius