Washington  - Microsoft has made the release candidate of Windows 7 available to the general public as a free download (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/download.aspx). Windows 7, slated for release later this year, is the successor to Windows Vista.

The new operating system has been designed to address many of the complaints that users have had with Windows Vista, including incompatibilities, annoyances with user account control (UAC), and general sluggishness. Windows 7 has so far received very favorable reviews from beta testers.

A "release candidate" of a software application is generally thought to be in the final stage of pre-release testing. Release candidates are typically "feature complete," meaning that they contain all of the features ultimately to be found in the shipping product. Release candidates may and probably do, however, still contain bugs, so they probably should not be used on production systems.

Both the 32-bit and the 64-bit versions of Windows 7 are available for download. (dpa)