Just received this email

did'nt get mine till 7.41pm

Sent Sat 02/05/2009 04:54

Mine was sent: Sat 02/05/2009 21:26 (time zone not specified)
But then I guess they're sending out rather a lot! 

Ah, looking at the headers: Date: Sat, 2 May 2009 13:25:52 -0700
(= 21:25:52 BST, which was just before it arrived)

I'm using RC now, installing it was a nightmare!  I'd boot from CD and it would just not do anything at all, just sit there taunting me, I burnt it to DVD twice before saying "lets try a RW" and that didn't work.  In the end I installed it through Vista and it works so far.

Got to admit, it seems even faster than Beta, IE opens in a fraction of a second and is so quick, oh and I just noticed its rendering this page perfectly instead of how the Beta IE would do.  The backgrounds are nice too.

Best of all daemon tools now has a version that works with Win7, PowerISO was good, but froze up every time I would right click an ISO.

I have to say installing it was a doddle. Didn't even need my RAID drivers as I'd had to for the Beta (on the same box) as they'd been included on the RC DVD.
Booted from the DVD, wiped a partition, answered a few questions and left it. Came back later - all done.
(Totally clean install of the 64-bit version)

As I am on value - I started the download (3GB - sheesh) and will restart when I go to bed - besides it will take for ever at peak time

I'm using Gizmo that I found shortly after installing the beta. Did a fresh install of RC1 last night and it was flawless. Still got to load a lot of my software back on but I must admit I'm really quite fond of Windows 7.

I very much like the Beta so far and will download RC later this evening.

How do you find Gizmo compared to Daemon Tools, Bob?  Does it support the same file range (not too sure on encryption myself, playing with Windows 2000 I encrypted stuff then reinstalled.....) and work with the same speeds?

That skin they use in the SS looks really nice and probably useful, I still can't get used to not having the Windows 95/98/Me menu, and I know older people who'll not like it either (first thing I do since XP is change it to classic).

I'm not going to overload it with software this time, rumour has it that Win7 will be released in Q4? Probably in time to catch the Xmas market and having to do another clean install will really make me sigh, so I'm going to go back and play Fm2009!  Already got Torquay into the Premiership, I give it a few seasons to pick up reputation and cash before I start to make a push to win!

October has been mentioned quite authoritatively; personally I think it could be even earlier - 3 months after RC = August.
Microsoft and the hardware manufacturers must be seeing a huge drop in sales due to this, after all who would want to buy Vista now? 

Seems to do the trick for what I've used it for (which is v.little tbh). It doesn't have the encryption stuff that Deamon Tools does.

I'm having a weird issue with Win7 and IE8, if I download a file it works fine, but if it uses a script which automatically tries to download the file, or a referer script, IE8 bugs out with "IE8 has stopped working" even though it brings up the save dialogue, its rather annoying and made me install Chrome if I desire to download stuff which IE8 can't.  Hopefully MS will fix it soon.

/edit - Bob, one for you Plusnet guys to be aware of.  Playing with Win7 it has wonderful trouble shooting options:

Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Troubleshooting

It can detect plugins that have caused IE to stop working, clean up stuff in start up, loads of stuff that would make finding problems with the internet much easier for your tech guys.  It's already disabled two IE plugins (from f-secure) that had caused IE to stop responding in the past 7 days.

I so can't wait for this OS to go Gold

Seems top be working without problems although Kaspersky wouldn't work (it's not supported although other users have managed it) so am using Avira.
One thing did surprise me - I installed it as a dual boot with Vista and the Windows 7 installation found my home network and connected to it without me needing to do anything other than define it as a home network for permissions

i installed last weekend and everything went smooth comodo and avg free are runing couldnt get them to install on the beta.
The only program that i couldnt get to run on W7 so far from my vista setup was netlimiter 2 but TBB monitor works

I've also installed the Virtual PC and Virtual Windows XP.
Seems to work, just trying to figure out the limitations.
For example I can't see the network, except folders explicitly mapped via drive letters.