Windows 7 RC (Release Candidate) is out, this is the version where no more new features will be added. This is as near as the original that you will get when Windows 7 is out. So try it out. I’m a fan of Windows 7 beta and I’m excited to hear that they made quite some improvements to it.

Some of the things i heard from friends who tried it out are:

1. Faster performance. A friend claim that its 30-40% faster than the beta
2. XP mode which i blog about previously. Now you can use your legacy application in XP mode.

Go download Windows 7 RC it @ http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/download.aspx. Downloading Windows 7 RC could take a few hours so use a download manager to speed things up. Get Free Download manager for free.

Windows 7 Beta upgrade to RC

For those of you who is using Windows 7 beta, there is no easy direct upgrade from beta to RC. However, there is a workaround and I tried it out and it works. Here are the step to it

• Download the ISO as you did previously and burn the ISO to a DVD.
• Copy the whole image to a storage location you wish to run the upgrade from (a bootable flash drive or a directory on any partition on the machine running the pre-release build).
• Browse to the sources directory.
• Open the file cversion.ini in a text editor like Notepad.
• Modify the MinClient build number to a value lower than the down-level build. For example, change 7100 to 7000 (pictured below).
• Save the file in place with the same name.
• Run setup like you would normally from this modified copy of the image and the version check will be bypassed.

I got the workaround are from the Windows 7 news

P.S

Before doing the upgrade, you MUST do a backup. Use a free tool by Microsoft call SyncToy to backup your data to an external hard drive.