This is the big public release of Windows 7 in the Release Candidate stage, which means it is now ‘feature complete’ but has been placed in the public domain for last-minute feedback. If you have Vista installed, you can choose to dual-boot in to either Vista or Windows 7. Alternatively, you could try a virtualisation tool such as VMware Workstation or VirtualBox and host Windows 7 on top of Vista (although this won’t offer you an enhanced experience).

There are plenty of new features and enhancements in Windows 7. We suggest you take a look through Microsoft’s Windows 7 website for more information.

The information below is taken from the Microsoft Windows 7 website.

Welcome to Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) testing. We're on our way to Windows 7, and if you like trying out pre-release software, now’s your chance. You get to see what's coming, and we get to see if our changes and fixes from the Beta testing are working correctly.

How do you test the software? You put it on your PC, and then do what you'd normally do. Your PC will automatically and anonymously send our engineers the information they need to verify the fixes and changes they made based on the Windows 7 Beta tests.

Note that the download here is for the 32-bit edition of Windows 7 and will expire on June 1, 2010.