Just a quick one here; Windows 7 is now available for pre-order for the wonderfully reasonable price of £44.97 for the Home Edition, or £89.97 for the Professional Edition, rather than paying £149.99 and £219.99 respectively after August 9th. At those prices, you might as well buy now even if you don’t intend to install yet until more patches and updates are released for it. It’s a steal, frankly.

I’m sure a fair few of you will have tried the Release Candidate lately; I know I’ve been using it on my main PC ever since I put it back together post-system meltdown. I never actually used Vista, but I can safely say it’s a huge improvement from XP, and presumably Vista. On the gaming side of things, I don’t think it’s a huge improvement performance wise, at least not yet. Plus we don’t really know how DirectX 11 will affect things, if at all, though I’d say that the fact they’re not hyping it up might be a good thing this time, meaning it might be more substance than smoke and mirrors. We shall see on that front.

So yes. If you’re looking to upgrade on day 1, now is the perfect time to buy it. And even if you’re not, now is also the perfect time to buy it. All I can say really is that I’m that impressed with the release candidate on my main system (risky, I know) that I’m breaking my long standing rule of never buying 1st generation versions of operating software, which to me sounds like as good a testimonial as any.

For a list of other participating UK retailers, see this link here. We’ll keep you posted when we find more information on the deal in other regions.

Update: Not sure what’s going on at the moment, but the prices seem to have gone up, at least on Amazon. My order still stands at £45 though… with any luck it will stay that way, rather than going up to the “new” price of £75.