Well what do you know, Windows 7 is ahead of schedule.

Okay, it's by four days but it's something.

Windows news site Neowin is reporting that Microsoft is is currently testing its first potential Release Candidate of Windows 7 and hopes to release it to the public on April 10. This jives with what I said three weeks ago, just off by four days.

Another blog, GeekSmack, relayed some interactions with Steven Sinofsky, the Microsoft exec in charge of Windows. Among other tidbits, Sinofsky reported 500,000 user reports from the "Send feedback" button on the Windows 7 beta desktop (which I have used several times now). Plus there's TechNet boards, MSDN boards and other avenues of feedback.

I have used Windows 7 Build 7000 for more than a month now and have found very few problems. By far the biggest problem is Windows Media Player 12. It's just plain bad and I'm looking at alternative players now.

I've also found the desktop shuffler to be buggy, too. Windows 7 lets you point to a directory of images and it will randomly display the images at the time interval of your choice. This is great because I've had to use a freeware utility under XP to do just that. Problem is, it has a tendency to stop working and set one image as the wallpaper, so I have to restart it.

But by and large, that's been the extent of my problems. I'm perfectly content to leave it on my main computer until the gold code comes out and can't wait to nuke the Vista directory.

Once again, Microsoft is maintaining the Q1 2010 party line, but hardly anyone believes that any more. I'll stick to the June release date we first reported last year, with the additional hope that the comments from nVidia's Mike Hara are a good indicator of pent-up demand and we'll see a pop in computer sales come Q3.