Release Candidate was released to public yesterday (or the day before depending on how convenient your timezone is) and available to everyone here and will be available at least through July 2009;
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/download.aspxThe RC will expire on June 1, 2010. As always with OS installations, make sure you have backups on external device.
I installed Win7 RC yesterday. Installation was rather quick and smooth, could have been quicker if I had installed Win7 from USB stick. You can do this with xcopy like this; xcopy e:\ f:\ /e /f (where e: is the mounted ISO-image and f: the USB stick)
After installation I proceeded to install all the usual suspects of the software I use. Only Daemon Tools was warned about by Win7 prior to installer starting, stating it was incompatible with Win7. Oh well, not a big deal. Only need to find another tool to mount disc images with. So far all installed apps work, haven't had time to do any gaming yet but I don't see any reason for them not to work if they work in Vista, which I was happily using before.
I have barely scratched the surface of Win7 but I made note of greatly improved memory management compared to Vista. Win7 only used about 768MB RAM on my main PC that has 8GB RAM. My buddy's laptop which only has 1GB RAM reported that about 40% of RAM was free, and this was while he was running other apps too. Microsoft certainly has made sure that Win7 works well on netbooks too as well as older PCs.
I encountered a strange problem with Win7 however. All my stuff is stored on external USB drive. Wherever I started an exe file that had been downloaded from internet, I got the usual "are you sure" dialog that was in Vista too, but for some reason Explorer window often froze as soon as the dialog appeared. But I could still open another explorer window and re-launch the exe file as usual and it worked. The previous Explorer window would unfreeze a bit later. Makes me wonder why it freezes temporarily. I have yet to confirm whether this happens on internal drive too.
That aside I didn't encounter any problems, at least none that I could see. I did go and see the event log however, and I see MS has made improvements in there too. Now among other things, Win7 warns about memory leaks in event logs and there was one memory leak reported. That's actually pretty cool to have.
However, my biggest issue with Vista was not fixed in Win7. The annoying feature which auto-ejects your optical drive tray whenever you click on the drive icon on Explorer and the drive is empty. I hate this feature because my case has a front door blocking the optical tray. Well, I hope this trick still works in Win7 as I haven't tried it yet;
http://www.vdhout.nl/20080712/UAC is less intrusive but I did not have a problem with it in Vista either. I prefer to be warned on actions that could be potentially malicious. I'll get back to this topic once I've actually used Win7 longer.
