If you got hold of a beta of Windows 7 way back in January of this year, it's important for you to know that the install will expire in in one week from the day I'm authoring this post. So here's your one week warning: Windows 7 Beta expires July 1, 2009.

The good news is you're not totally shafted. It's pretty easy to get your hands on a copy of the Windows 7 RC. Although the upgrade scenario isn't supported (my personal policy is to always start fresh when using beta software, especially when it's the OS), the Windows engineering team has written a blog post that describes how to attempt to perform an upgrade.

Anyway, the moral of the post is this: if you are still running the Windows 7 Beta, the clock is ticking. Back up your data and either move to the Windows 7 RC (it works *great*, by the way) or back to an RTM version of Windows.

A couple of weeks ago I requested feedback on topics we should put forward for our August and September event dates. Unfortunately that call for feedback only generated one piece of feedback – the really good topic of Commerce Server 2009.

So I'm curious again… Tell us what topics you would like to see in our late summer events. Is Commerce Server a good topic? Or should we dig deep into Azure and what it means for architects, developers and IT/operations professionals?

Direct message me on Twitter or leave a comment here.

I've linked up several new 10-4 videos to the webcast and video archive listing on my web site. I also have several (now somewhat dated) presentations as well as upcoming events and upcoming webcasts listed up there as well.

Hopefully, if I manage to carve out some time later this today or this week, I will write a post that lists a load of readiness resources for IE8, Azure, ASP.NET AJAX, and Visual Studio 2010 I've been hoarding. Yeah, some of them date back a couple of months, but these are readiness resources (translation: light training resources) scattered hither and yon across our various Microsoft.com sites and properties. I thought I'd collate them together into a single post or few (topically grouped, of course) to make it easier for you to find them.

Before that post I need to share an update on my experiences with the Windows 7 RC I have running on my Dell Latitude E6400 work laptop. Very, very nice… Powerful, fast, and quite robust. I am very pleased, even though it took me the better part of a month getting it set up and configured with all my preferred apps and customizations. If I didn't tweak everything like crazy, I swear I could be more agile.

We've locked in late summer and early fall dates for our ArcReady, MSDN Events Unleashed, and TechNet Events Unleashed series. They will be starting roughly mid-August and running through the end of September. As of now we will be visiting all of our usual cities, and – based on feedback from people in the community – we are looking at the possibility of visiting other cities than our core 16 or 17.

ArcReady
This is our event series for architects and the more senior developers interested in architecture or people interested in becoming architects. We predominately focus on overarching themes and topics, such as cloud computing, web site performance and scalability or – the current event series topic – architecting for the client. We explore architectural paradigms, key concepts, and patterns and how you can apply them to your business initiatives or challenges.

MSDN Events Unleashed
These events are an extension of the nationally-planned and -run MSDN Events. They focus in on one or two core development topics, digging deep into developing solutions using Silverlight and Blend, producing client applications using WPF, or how to best exploit Windows 7 in custom-developed applications. This is our bread-and-butter development event series.

TechNet Events Unleashed
Similar to our locally run developer events, these are an extension of the nationally-executed TechNet Events. These events deliver topics relevant to the IT professionals, from Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 to Exchange and SharePoint to System Center. These speakers are the experts, and will help IT professionals plumb the internals of our core infrastructure products and technologies.

A Request for Feedback
Here's the rub – we have not chosen topics yet. As the manager in charge of audience and community engagement in the Central Region (which involves running these events, amongst other things), I would like to hear from you.

Do you have any suggestions? Are there any topics or products you would like to see us cover? If so, leave a comment at http://twitter.com/briandmoore or on the old blog here.

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably heard by now that the Windows 7 Release Candidate is available for download for MSDN and TechNet subscribers. Tomorrow, May 5th, it becomes available broadly for everyone. I spent some time this past weekend installing the 64-bit version fresh on my Dell Latitude E6400 as well as my wife's Dell Inspiron™ 15. Both installs went pretty much flawlessly.

My E6400 – The Work Laptop
On my work computer, the Windows Experience Rating (how well the system performs) increased from 3.5 with Windows Vista to 3.8 on Windows 7. The low scoring component was a business-class graphics adapter, which isn't terribly relevant as I don't play games on my work computers. As a counterpoint, everything else (CPU, memory, disk IO, etc.) all jumped from high 4.x and low 5.x scores to high 5.x scores with the move to Windows 7. Unlike my M1330, this E6400 is ripping fast with a speedy Core Duo processor, great cache, and a 7200RPM SATA drive. The laptop is a rocket with Windows 7.

Install only took about 15 minutes, and every device except one (a fingerprint reader) was found with 64-bit drivers. All were found from the install media, and only the graphics adapter had a Windows Update push a few minutes after getting the network up and running. I will have to hunt down that fingerprint reader driver, but even in this the Action Center knew what was missing so I didn't even have to troll through Device Manager to find out. (Honesty time: I did check Device Manager, too, but that's just because I'm a geek.)

I've had a chance to play with it a bit today and it's every bit as fast, if not faster, than the beta. Even more impressive, this OS is solid. With a good 9 hours of straight use it's still running like a champ, performing strong and no glitches encountered thus far.

My Wife's Inspiron – The Family Laptop
On my wife's computer, the Windows Experience Rating went from 3.5 under Windows Vista to 4.0 under Windows 7. That's a pretty hefty jump. The install was quite fast, from FDISK to boot in roughly 20 minutes. Every single device was recognized and supported (yes, this is x64). All 4GB of RAM is recognized, and almost all of her core applications installed fine. Office 2007, Adobe Acrobat, and Adobe Flash all worked great, though I did have to change the defaults for Adobe – their site thought I was running Windows NT 4.0; a quick change to Vista 64-bit and everything installed and ran fine.

I only had one issue with the initial setup: Norton Internet Security 2009. The installer blocked on Windows 7, claiming it was an unsupported system. Easy to correct with the Compatibility Troubleshooter (right-click the executable). I selected Windows Vista SP1 mode, launched the installer, and it installed just fine and is running nicely.

I will point out that, once I turned the laptop over to her, she did run into a glitch installing the Java runtime from a website plug-in. I didn't have a chance to troubleshoot, but I suspect it's something that can be either worked around by getting the runtime direct from Sun or otherwise addressed. I am confident she can still do most if not all of the things she is used to doing in Windows Vista. I'll update with a post to let you know how things are running for her.

One Last Plug
Did I mention Windows 7 fast? Very, very fast…