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the difference is that the windows 7 rc its a (RC) and the windows 7 rtm its a (RTM) DUH! how easy is that

None that you may notice, but I’m sure somewhere deep down in the installation files or hidden in the registry, they are quite different. Probably a few bugs fixed, improved optimization and speed, and other minor changes to improve stability.

And these different versions know they are different. For example, the RC knows its activation will expire sometime in 2010 and the RTM knows its activation doesn’t never expire (unless you’re running a crack/hacked/illegal version and Microsoft fixes that crack/hack). Also, if you’ve upgraded from the RC to RTM using the Windows 7 upgrade disk and decide to do a clean install of Windows 7 again, you’ll first need to install an older version of Windows to use the upgrade disk again.

No big differences have been found between Win7 RC and Win7 RTM.

There should be a lot of bug fixes and general optimization of the core components.

The RTM has no watermark and has more stability performance and a general “finality”

I’m still using the RC. It works perfectly fine, has all the features that I’ve read the RTM version has, so I haven’t bothered to change yet.

The Release Candidate was a testing version released in early May. It’s essentially a polished beta, and something they’re more or less “proposing” for release.

They distribute it broadly so they can get feedback on a broad array of systems and find what bugs are out there they can’t find on their own. The Release Candidate is considered “feature complete,” meaning they’re not going to add any more things to it or tweak it around a lot functionally — it’s used first and foremost to discover and iron out bugs before final release.

RTM wasn’t declared until late July, almost 3 months later. That’s 3 months of assembling bug reports, making the system more efficient, etc. It’s also finalizing included drivers, etc.

You wouldn’t “see” a difference from the RC to RTM because they don’t change features between the two. But a lot of bugs are gone by the time of RTM, it’s more stable, and it should be faster as it’s been optimized for actual release without as much debugging code remaining. Moving forward, the RC won’t get updates and expires, and RTM is the “gold” software that gets formal support. The changes that occur in RTM are all under the hood and not things you’d really “see.”