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.

Microsoft have officially confirmed that May 5 is the official public release date for the Windows 7 Release Candidate.

“I’m pleased to share that the RC is on track for April 30th for download by MSDN and TechNet subscribers. Broader, public availability will begin on May 5th,” wrote Microsoft’s Brandon LeBlanc in a corporate blog.

This follows news of a possible Windows XP virtualisation mode which allows Windows 7 to run older software that doesn’t work on Vista or Windows 7 natively. The “WinXP mode” has not been confirmed yet by Microsoft, so consider it a rumour at this stage.

It seems after years of denying any support for Blu-ray, Microsoft may be finally softening their stance. Check out this Microsoft TV commercial (the interesting part is at 0:43):

Interesting stuff. We may even see a Blu-ray addon for the XBOX 360 in the coming months.

You can read more at CNET.