The much lauded 'second half of July' release to manufacturing (RTM) of Windows 7 has happened as predicted. MS seem very pleased with themselves, and so they should be. October 22nd is the official release date, though Partners, Developers and OEMs will get their hands on the RTM release over the next couple of months.

Also announced is the RTM of Windows 2008 R2. I'm looking forward to deploying desktops and servers with both RTM versions as soon we get to look at it at work.

Microsoft EMEA store is now taking pre-orders for Windows 7. Well, they would be if the site wasn't broken - thus proving the popularity of the new O/S!

I for one am looking forward to ordering my own copy - something I would never have even considered with Vista. In the end, Vista came pre-loaded on my laptop, but that was swiftly removed for Ubuntu at the time. Since Windows 7 was released, it speaks volumes that I've hardly used Ubuntu - even for my web development work. In fact, I much prefer the Windows 7 interface to everything other than the Mac.

Although Windows XP is still what I consider to be Microsoft's finest operating system to date, I think Windows 7 may give it a real run for its money. Time will tell.

Pre-orders of Windows 7 "E" edition (Europe Edition - the one without IE8) are available in the UK from:

• Microsoft Store.
• Argos.
• Amazon.co.uk.
• Comet.
• Currys.
• Dixons.
• Ebuyer.com.
• Play.com.
• Littlewoods.
• John Lewis.
• Micro Anvika.
• PCWorld.
• Staples.
• Tesco.

(Source: markwilson.it)

[Update] I have pre-ordered mine from Ebuyer, £80 including Free delivery. Can't be bad!

Well, this blog has come to an abrupt stop. There are a multitude of reasons, but mainly because my wife and I are expecting the arrival of our first child later in the year. Days I would have been sat in front of the computer are now spent visiting Mothercare, Mamas and Papas and all manner of other baby-related shopping experiences. Not that I'm complaining - life is very exciting at the moment!!

I'm also very busy at work (both in my day job and at home) swapping between development (home) and infrastructure work (day job). On the development side, I've just finished writing another couple of sections of my CodeIgniter CMS (the one that drives this site), which should make it easier for me to update the site on a more regular basis. Additionally, I've been doing some prep work for the next CodeIgniter for Intype screencast.

In my day job I've been involved in some work revolving around Windows 7 and MDT 2010. If I get the time in the next couple of months I'll write a full article on deployment of Windows 7, and the affect Microsoft's decision to pull IE8 from the European release of Windows 7 has on business deployments.

The first in a series of Screencasts showcasing the CodeIgniter for Intype snippets bundle is now online.

In this screencast, I demonstrate the easiest method for installing the CodeIgniter bundle for Intype.

Also included is an introduction to using the snippets snippets included in the bundle.

Watch now

Following a very positive experience with the Windows 7 beta on my HP laptop, I decided that once the Release Candidate came out that I would run Windows 7 as my main O/S for the next few months.

The installation on the laptop went very smoothly. In addition to my Windows partition, Windows 7 reserved a 100Mb partition (down from 200Mb in the beta) to be used by EFI boot and BitLocker. As expected, my data partitions remained intact.

Once installed (approx. 35 minutes) Windows 7 successfully connected to my Wireless network - Windows Vista x64 failed - and I was up and running very quickly. So far I haven't found any of my day-to-day applications that will not work, however I will be testing out the new Windows XP Mode (which I will use for IE6 backwards compatibility testing).

I'm glad to be able to say that Windows 7 RC is much faster for me than the beta, it seems far more polished and there is no question that I'll be returning to use Vista any time soon. It really is that much better.

Regarding drivers, once I'd run through Windows Update to get the drivers for the nVidia graphics and Connexant High Definition Audio there was one solitary device ("Coprocessor") left. To fix this, I installed the Vista nVidia nForce Chipset drivers and everything was looking much better. Unlike the beta, the Audio was not 'crackling' on startup, and despite the beta being quite fast, the startup times for the Release Candidate were even quicker. Unlike XP and Vista, I have now reverted to a full Shutdown rather than using Hibernate as it's actually quicker on the laptop to start from a cold boot.

Over the next few weeks I will be trying out Windows 7 deployment using the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 beta, and then with SCCM (once SP2 is out)