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In a recent blog post by Brandon LeBlanc, the release of the much awaited Windows 7 RC has been confirmed to April 3oth for MSDN/TechNet subscribers and May 5th for everyone else.

As I described in a previous post, I’ve been using the Windows 7 beta since it came out. My favorite operating system before that was Windows XP. I never liked Vista. I loved the eye candy and the new features, but I wasn’t willing to trade it for the performance and memory hit it required. Windows 7 truly is everything that Vista should have been.

I’ve been doing everything with and to my Windows 7 installations. I’ve coded and debugged, played games, watched movies, listened to music, installed all kinds of quirky software and utilities, and of course browsed the web. So far, it’s been the best and most solid operating system Microsoft has released since MS DOS 6.22. I mean, it’s difficult to compete with the solidity of MS DOS. After all, there wasn’t a lot in there. No pesky graphics drivers and so on.

I’ve not had a single crash since I first installed it. I’ve only had to reboot a few times after driver updates and I’ve only turned the computer off once (I was on a one week vacation). Other than that, my desktop computer has been running non-stop for almost four months without so much as a hiccup.

My laptop has far more battery life that those of my colleagues (exact same laptops, but with Windows Vista), and boots in one third of the time or less.

So far, after all my code-bashing and system abuse, the only problem I’ve had with Windows 7 is on my laptop, where the wireless adapter fails to recover from hibernation. Not exactly a show-stopper.

Both of my Wacom tablets work perfectly. Without any special drivers, I might add. All the hardware on all my installations is accounted for, except my HP LaserJet 1000 printer. Which is mostly because HP discontinued it years ago and the newest drivers available are for 32 bit Windows XP, and I don’t want to … soil … my 64 bit installation with 32 bit XP drivers, that’s even if I could get them to work in the first place. I couldn’t get them to work in Vista, so I didn’t even bother trying in Windows 7.

I instead export a PDF file to an UNC drop folder, which is then picked up by a little service running on one of my servers where the printer is attached and printed from there.

All in all, I can but tip my hat to Microsoft, for a job very well done!