Windows 7 launch set for October 23
Windows 7 will be released on October 23 according to a loose-lipped laptop manufacturer. The release date would be ahead of Microsoft’s forecasts and could capitalize on the Christmas sales market.
The pocket-lint Web site quotes the British boss of Acer, Bobby Watson, as saying the firm’s new Z5600 PC will go on sale on that date with Windows 7. Anyone buying an Acer PC running Vista in the 30 days beforehand will get a free upgrade to the new system. And the firm will be demonstrating Windows 7 on display models during that 30 day period.
Microsoft hasn’t said anything official on the release date, though Windows chief Bill Veghte noted earlier this week, “A holiday release is accomplishable”. The only official timescale Microsoft has given publicly is a goal of having the system out three years after Vista’s release, which would be January 23 next year.
An October release would be good news for the firm as it opens up the Christmas gift market. That could be particularly profitable if the slimmed down Windows 7 proves a hit on low-cost netbooks.
In other Windows 7 news, the release candidate is now available to members of Microsoft’s MSDN and Technet groups, with the public release coming on Tuesday. As is becoming a familiar pattern, the download servers have already crashed, which either means interest was extremely high, Microsoft screwed up the server capacity, or Microsoft set the system up so it would be overloaded and make a good story.
Microsoft has also confirmed the official minimum specs for Windows 7. As expected, they are a 1GHz processor, 1GB of RAM (or 2GB for the 64-bit edition) and 16GB free disk space. The most notable point is that these are virtually identical to Vista, the first time there’s been no increase between editions. Of course, as Vista proved, there can be a big difference between the stated minimum specs and what you’ll need to use the system in the real world.
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