Windows 7: One year to try before you buy

Microsoft made the first release candidate of Windows 7 available for free download on Thursday. In an unprecedented move for the company, the software will run on a user's PC for more than a year.

Windows 7 RC1 can be downloaded now by MSDN, TechBeta and TechNet subscribers, and the general public will be able to download it on 5 May. There is no limit to how many copies can be downloaded. The software will run until 1 June, 2010, in what a Microsoft marketing manager described to silicon.com sister site ZDNet UK as a "try before you buy" scenario.

Laurence Painell said in a prebriefing session on Wednesday: "There is no cap on the amount of downloads [of Windows 7 RC1]. However, we only recommend that people with a reasonable amount of IT knowledge use it."

Windows 7, the successor to Vista, brings new features such as multitouch interaction, a redesigned taskbar at the bottom of the desktop and an integrated search feature that allows the user to search across the client PC and corporate network at once. Power management has also been improved, as Microsoft has been keen to focus Windows 7 on portable computing.

When Windows 7 went into beta in January, an executive from the company told ZDNet UK that the beta version was "feature complete". However, Painell revealed on Wednesday that two features present in the beta - a built-in Bluetooth audio driver and the ability to have a guest account - have been dropped from the release candidate.

Painell could not explain why Windows 7 would not automatically include a Bluetooth audio driver. He suggested, however, that the omission of the guest-account feature was because Microsoft "has not seen a huge amount of uptake of it".

The omission of another feature - the ability to have thumbdrives or any media other than optical disks autorun - was announced by Microsoft on Tuesday. The company said this decision had been taken in the light of recent malware, such as the Conficker virus, that uses USB memory sticks as an attack vector.

Asked how this would affect, for example, Linux distributions that are designed to run from flash drives, Painell said users "could still run that distribution from an optical disk".

The RC1 also has new features not found in the beta version, such as the ability to stream media between PCs in a Slingbox-like fashion. Another addition - that of an XP virtual machine built into the Professional and Ultimate version of Windows 7 - was announced by Microsoft on Friday.

Painell said an XP application running on Windows 7 would "look like an XP application but you won't need a virtual PC interface running around it". He added that those applications would be able to share the clipboard and documents folder with their Windows 7 host.

It is not clear how Windows 7's XP virtual machines will handle the issue of driver compatibility. Microsoft has also conceded that there will not be 100 per cent compatibility between all XP applications and Windows 7's virtual machines (VM), and has asked software vendors and customers to test such applications in the VMs, providing feedback to Microsoft before the operating system's final release.

Painell told ZDNet UK that small businesses - the target audience for the XP virtual machines - would have to install applications to each virtual machine, without the ability to centrally install and control such applications from the server level.

Business customers will be encouraged to use Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V) to centrally administer their XP virtual machines. However, Microsoft said on Wednesday that the updated version of Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP), which will come out within three months of Windows 7's general release, will include only a beta version of MED-V.

Asked why Microsoft was introducing XP virtual machines on business versions of Windows 7, Painell said the VMs were designed to bridge compatibility issues with software. He said this may be useful...

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