Windows 7 Release Candidate available now

I’ve now upgraded 4 different PCs to Win7 Release Candidate (build 7100) and each one has gone swimmingly – you too can share in the fun by downloading the release candidate for yourself.

The Windows development team are looking to test the upgrade process from Vista to Windows 7, so are asking customers who upgraded from Vista to Windows 7 beta, to regress first to Vista then upgrade to RC from there. Out of the box, the RC won’t do an in-place upgrade from previous versions of Windows 7, before build 7077. [The beta was 7000].

Since I did a clean install of the beta on a few machines, I’ve used the cheeky workaround here to allow the setup to be tricked into allowing it to go ahead. The only problem I’ve had – and this happened on going between interim builds of W7 too – is that the Lenovo thinkpad keyboard & tablet buttons driver doesn’t work until I go into Device Manager and force a driver update… so initial login needs to be from a Remote Desktop connection or via a plugged-in USB keyboard.