Sorry you must be confusing it with Vista .. I run Win 7 beta on a P4 2.2GHz (single Core) 1.5 GB ram (DDR 1) ATI Radeon 9800 pro Vid card (512MB) and a 60GIG HDD (for OS) and it flies, its even faster than XP that i use. And Vista just laughs at all of that and groans it's way to life very very very sloowwllyy then promptly crashes completely locked solid

I like all the comments from people who have obviously never installed or ran Windows 7. I have it running on an old HP laptop and it runs better than XP did. I also have it loaded at home in a VMware Workstation 6 machine with 1 processor and 512mb RAM and I have all features including Aero (Workstation 6 does directx 9c graphic acceleration now). It runs fantastic. So the comments about several quad cores and 16gb of ram to run notepad is trolling nonsense.

egg marinade - thats BS i use it on a dual core with 2gb of ram and its faster than my xp install

I logged into MSDN and didn't see anything new under Windows 7. Only the beta release (build 7000) from January 8.

Sorry, Inspiron 8200, P4 1.7GHz, 768MB PC2700.
Works quite well, aside from the lack of driver support for the Geforce 4 440 Go.

Comparable performance to XP, *much* faster than Vista.

windows 7 is great but the only downside is you need several quad core cpus and 16 gig of ram just to run notepad!
anything less and it will be outperformed by a zx81...

So I guess I will ask the obvious question... is it available on Technet yet?

What Microsoft calls a “release candidate” is what everyone else calls a “beta”.

I've been messing around with the beta and some versions after and its a really solid build. wonder what exactly will be new in the RC.