This is it! Today, August 1st, 2009 is the final expiration deadline for Build 7000, which is the first and only Beta development milestone of Windows 7. This means that Windows 7 Beta lived for approximately seven months, judging from the official public release date on January 9, 2009. Following August 1st, testers that insist on running Beta Build 7000 will receive the same experience as if the operating system was pirated.

In all fairness, users still testing Windows 7 Beta have had a transition period. As of July 1st, 2009, copies of Windows 7 Beta still running have been rebooting once every two hours. This was nothing but a prequel to the August 1st death of the Beta development milestone and means that the people still using Windows 7 Beta need to find an alternative, and fast.

Fortunately enough, the answer is extremely simple. Microsoft continues to offer for download the Release Candidate build of Windows 7. Build 7100 is still up for grabs from the Redmond company, even though it was released in May 2009, and will continue to be accessible to users for the most part of this month.

“The Release Candidate download ends on August 20th. You will still be able to get a product key beyond that date but downloads will not be available. So if you have not downloaded the release candidate, please do so soon,” Microsoft's Stephen L Rose revealed.

Of course, Microsoft has already released Windows 7 to manufacturing. The bits of the latest iteration of Windows 7 were signed off on July 22nd, 2009, and Microsoft has started gearing up for the general availability on October 22nd, 2009. Windows 7 Build 7600.16385 RTM has already been leaked in the wild, and made available for download. An OEM crack surfaced to activate permanently the leaked builds, but Microsoft made sure to tackle the bypass.

32-bit and 64-bit Windows 7 (Release Candidate) RC Build 7100.0.090421-1700 is available for download here.