Let the testing begin! Windows 7 Release Candidate will be available April 30th for MSDN and Tech Net subscribers and May 5th for the general public (and sooner via the less legitimate sources)

This build is 7100 and as far as Media Center is concerned I can’t seen any major changes but the Extender streaming performance may have been improved. According to Ed Bott “The Release Candidate build is officially 7100, but functionally it’s identical to the leaked builds that have been circulating for several weeks”.

What is interesting is the new virtual XP mode which Ed says:

“In a nutshell, when Windows 7 is released to manufacturing Microsoft plans to release an add-on called Windows XP Mode for users of its business versions of Windows 7 that will include a fully licensed copy of Windows XP SP3 running in a virtual machine.”

Now I don’t expect this to be XP MCE so no mixed XP Media Center / Windows 7 Media Center environments but it will be great for compatibility with old XP only apps

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