Windows 7 Release Candidate coming 5 May

Microsoft spins out another 'leak'

Redmond suffered yet another butter fingers incident over the weekend when the company let slip that the near-ready version of Windows 7 will be made available on 5 May.

The company's partner program website revealed the date for the release candidate of its forthcoming operating system on Saturday.

Neowin picked up on the apparent gaffe and has a screen grab of the website here. Microsoft has since amended it, by removing the date from its site.

It had been carrying the message that paying subscribers to MDSN and TechNet could get their hands on the RC ahead of the 5 May release, when partners will be able to download it too.

"Partners: If you have a subscription to MSDN or TechNet, you can download Windows 7 RC now." said the website on Saturday. "Otherwise, you can download Windows 7 RC starting May 5, 2009."

This is the second time inside a month that one of Microsoft's websites has leaked details about Windows 7 RC.

Last month the firm 'mistakenly' revealed the RC was coming in May, would be available until June this year, that there's no limit on product key and it's set to expire in June 2010.

It also detailed hardware spec requirements for the operating system, including a PC running a minimum 1 GHz 32-bit or 64-bit processor or higher, 1GB of system memory and support for DirectX 9 graphics with 128MB memory. ®