Microsoft have made their Release Candidate 1 of Windows 7 available for download. It will be available until the end of July. To download Windows 7 RC 1, you need to join up to the Customer Preview Program.

Release Candidate 1 will expire on June 1, 2010. Hopefully by that time we should all be using the Final release.

Recommended system specs: a 1GHz processor or faster, DirectX 9-enabled graphics processor with WDDM 1.0+, 1 GB RAM and 16GB of storage for a 32-bit installation, or 2 GB RAM and 20GB of storage for 64-bit.

Both the 32- and 64-bit versions of Release Candidate 1 are available in English, German, Japanese, French, and Spanish.

You can grab the 32 bit version here, or the 64 bit version here.

It should be noted that Release Candidate 1 and later versions will not be able to communicate with “pre-RC computers” remotely, because the default HTTP/HTTPS ports for WinRM and PowerShell have been changed.