Windows 7 Release Candidate now available for download

The Windows 7 Release Candidate (Build 7100) was made available a few days ago to people who have memberships on MSDN and Technet. Microsoft has now also released the Release Candidate to the general public.

For now, the Windows 7 Release Candidate is only available in English, German, Japanese, French, and Spanish. The first language packs will be provided within two weeks, including the Dutch one. Furthermore, this Release Candidate comes in two flavors: 32-bit and 64-bit. We are also dealing here with the Ultimate version of the operating system.

You don’t have to worry about an end date, because the Release Candidate is valid until June 1, 2010. From March 1, 2010, the system will automatically shut down every two hours to remind the user to install a full version of Windows 7.

If you are already interested and want to download the Release Candidate, you can do so via the official website of Microsoft. Here are the minimum system requirements required to run Windows 7:

• CPU: 1 GHz or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
• RAM: 1 GB RAM (32-bit) / 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
• Hard drive: 16 GB available disk space (32-bit) / 20 GB (64-bit)
• Graphics card: DirectX 9 graphics processor with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver