Word on the street has it that the release candidate for Windows 7 will be up for download to the public near the end of May. This is a month later than some of us expected in April. The release candidate will be the closest thing to the final version, fixing most or all of the bugs that were encountered during beta testing.

The official beta release (Build 7000) has sparked great interests in this new operating system, both positive and negative. It does seem like the most noise is made by angry Vista users, either claiming that Microsoft owes them this new OS as an apology or that Windows 7 should be given to them for free as a service pack. Windows 7 is built on the existing framework used in Vista, but countless performance tweaks have been made, and enough changes have been made for Microsoft to call it another increment in their line of operating systems.

If you can’t wait around for the official release candidate, you can always scour for some of the ‘leaked’ builds on the torrent sites. Currently I’m using one of those (Build 7057) which features many of the changes that Microsoft promised we would see in the RC build. Alt-tab now has Aero-peak, finding a space to right click in a full folder is easier, and many other tweaks and bug fixes are in this leaked build.

When you want to install a later build of Windows 7, you can simply upgrade by inserting and running your disk while in Windows, and you’ll be able to keep 99% of your settings and all of your files. Some tech sites do point out that for optimal performance it is better to do a clean install, but that can become quite a hassle after tweaking everything to the way you like and losing it all and starting over.

How have your experiences been using official or unofficial builds of Windows 7? Let us know in the comments.