14 DAY TRIAL // The leaked builds of Windows 7 are succeeding one another rapidly as the operating system advances from Release Candidate to RTM (mid-July 2009). With the development process already long moved past the 7200 mark, the next iteration of the Windows client is now all the way up to Build 7227. Unofficial confirmation is delivered by Build 7227 itself, the latest development milestone of Windows 7 that has made it out of Redmond, and subsequently was leaked and made available for download through various illegal third-party websites, including torrent trackers.
As I reported in the past, there is more than one branch associated with the Windows 7 building process. In this context winmain is the main development branch. The vast majority of previous Windows 7 leaks could be traced back to winmain, the development effort that will end up producing the plain vanilla gold variant of Windows 7. I say plain vanilla because there is also the winmain_sp branch. In winmain_sp builds of Windows 7 come bundled with Service Pack 1. This is the case of Windows 7 Build 7227.
Belonging to the winmain_sp branch, Build 7227 is Windows 7 plus SP1, Wzor confirms. The full build string is 6.1.7227.0.winmain_sp.090602-2110, suggesting that the bits were compiled on June 2nd, 2009. I asked Microsoft whether it forked (split the build tree) the Windows 7 development process and is building RTM and SP1 builds of Windows 7 in parallel, but I only got a “no comment” response from the Redmond company.
I wasn't really expecting much since the software giant has been completely mute on the interim builds of Windows 7 being built and served to select Technology Adoption Program testers and close partners, or simply dogfooded (used internally). But the fact that Microsoft is managing to keep mum on the evolution of Windows 7 since Build 7100 hit the download pipes at the start of May doesn't mean that interim builds of the platform aren't produced on a regular, even daily basis.
Still, users who want to get a taste of Windows 7 plus Service Pack 1 (SP1) can turn to torrent websites. A simple BitTorrent client is all that's needed to grab Windows 7 Build 7227 from peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. However, users will find that they won't be able to install Build 7227. The release comes packaged as a .VHD (virtual hard disk) image that is designed to be run as a guest operating system in a virtual machine powered by products such as Virtual PC 2007 or Windows Virtual PC.
Only the 32-bit flavor of Windows 7 Build 7227 has been leaked and is available for download. The bits are accompanied by the following information: CRC: 616985FA; MD5: F98F78D86940761D8909023A00C75704; SHA1: 082F189EE4F58393D3CB113B0F46EC0E1EE41BD8.
