14 DAY TRIAL // And just when you think that Windows 7 leaks cannot get any better, there's a new week to surprise you. After last week no less than three Builds of Windows 7 made it out of Redmond and into the wild, this week has already brought two development milestones of the next iteration of the Windows client to the public. In this regard, Windows 7 Build 7260 has followed Build 7232 to torrent trackers and warez websites. But unlike previous leaks, which continued to be intimately connected with the Release Candidate Build 7100 milestone, Build 7260 represents a turning point for Windows 7, as Microsoft has dropped the RC label for RTM.
The company did give itself until the second half of July 2009 to release Windows 7 to manufacturing, but this is not to say that it could now have compiled the code before the official RTM deadline. The End User License Agreement no longer features any reference to Beta or Release Candidate milestones, and in fact comes with no reference at all, indicating that Windows 7 Build 7260 is RTM. Furthermore, the EULA has the leaked build labeled as Win7_RM.0_ULT_RTL_en-us. As you can see from the screenshot included below, Windows 7 Build 7260 is all the information supplied by Winver (courtesy of Wzor), also pointing to the fact that the release is the RTM build.
Microsoft is reportedly already making headway when it comes down to assembling Windows 7 RTM development milestones. The full build string for the latest leak release is 6.1.7260.0.win7_rtm.090612-2110, compiled on June 12, 2009. However, the software giant has already passed this mark, and is now up to 6.1.7261.0.win7_rtm.090615-1900, compiled just two days ago, on June 15th.
Just like 7227, 7231 and 7232, leaked Windows 7 Build 7260 comes packaged as a .VHD (virtual hard disk) image file. This means that users will need to run it inside a virtual machine using Virtual PC 2007 or Windows Virtual PC. This is possible because the release is the 32-bit (x86) version of the operating system. Leaked Windows 7 Build 7260 comes with the following information: CRC: 67C23FE0, MD5: 0703C259676D7E4C58E0EF2184369663 and SHA1: 7540399601506675CF1B329CB3507875F64C555B.
