At the start of this week, abundant speculation that Microsoft was going to release Windows 7 to manufacturing on the first day of the Worldwide Partner Conference 2009, New Orleans, July 13, 2009, was confirmed officially by Microsoft's Bill Veghte, senior vice president, Windows Business

At the same time, the Redmond company squashed the rumors on the official Windows team blog indicating Windows 7 had not been signed off, and that RTM would come in late July 2009. Subsequently, Veghte's words were altered in order to correct a transcription error, and to reveal that Windows 7 would be wrapped up by the end of this month, rather than on July 13th. Further fueling rumors of the imminent Windows 7 RTM was Windows 7 Build 7600, leaked at the end of the past week and available for download in the wild. 6.1.7600.16384.win7_rtm.090710-1945, compiled on July 10th, 2009, was initially offered by torrent trackers and warez websites as a VHD image designed for use with a virtual machine. Still, following Microsoft denying that Windows 7 Build 7600.16384 was the gold release of the next iteration of the Windows client, the ISO of the 64-bit flavor of 7600.16384 also made its way out of Redmond. No, 6.1.7600.16384.win7_rtm.090710-1945 is not Windows 7 RTM. Microsoft has, since the leak, produced an interim build of the operating system superseding 7600.16384. It is the case of 6.1.7600.16385.win7_rtm.090713-1255, which followed the same path as many of its precursors, leaked and up for grabs from illegal, third-party sources, but, this time around, with both the 32-bit and the 64-bit ISO images available. Windows 7 Build 7600.16384 installation Below, you will be able to find screenshots of the installation of Windows 7 Build 7600.16384. I turned to Virtual Box to get the job done, because of support for the 64-bit flavor of Windows 7. Microsoft still has a long way to go before Windows Virtual PC will catch up with Sun's client virtualization solution. Windows Virtual PC of course only offers support for 32-bit guest operating systems, and wasn't in any way capable of running x64 Windows 7 Build 7600.16384. The deployment process itself brings nothing new to the table, compared with, let's say, Build 7264. There is no mention of the development stage in the End User License Agreement, an indication of RTM, and the milestone is referred to as Win7_RM.0_ULT_RTL_en-us at the end of the EULA. Personally, I don't expect any more changes to the Windows 7 installer in the RTM version. Judging by the evolution of Windows 7 from Release Candidate, Microsoft is done with implementing changes to the deployment process. Users familiar with installing post-RC Windows 7 builds will undoubtedly run into the same experience with the gold version of the platform. And fact is that the wait is almost over. In less than two weeks, Microsoft will have released Windows 7 to manufacturing.

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