Microsoft has confirmed the date for its first release candidate of Windows 7.

The date is April 30 — Thursday next. The much awaited Windows 7 Release Candidate 1 will be sent to Microsoft’s Developer Network membership and TechNet for download. The operating system will be made generally available on May 5.

Following the perceived failure of Windows Vista to business customers at least, the company is pitching hard for these customers to migrate to Windows 7.

A spokesman said, “All you need to do is to install suitable applications directly in Windows XP Mode. The applications will be published to the Windows 7 desktop and then you can run them directly from Windows 7.”

This will require a new add-on, XPM, which will be available Windows 7 is shipped. A beta of the add-on would be released “soon”, the company said.

Those of us who use Windows Vista and who have few complaints beyond the usual trivial grumbles, may wonder why we should upgrade again to the soon-to-be upon us Windows 7.

Enticingly, Windows 7 is built on the Vista codebase, which means that, at its heart, is Windows Vista. This should not be a traumatic move, even though many users, especially in business, are still using XP.

Microsoft has though moved the deckchairs around and added a lot of extra features. It also runs well on Vista hardware, namely PCs that have been designed and optimised for Vista. Windows 7 is designed to boot faster, run smoother and is said to outperform Vista on the same machine.

Windows 7’s kernel is around a tenth the size of the kernels in XP and Vista. This promises an improvement in reliability and also means that the company now has a self-contained building block that makes it simpler and quicker to test and add new features, without having to worry about the rest of the operating system.

Overall, this operating system promises to do many of the things Windows Vista failed to do when it launched.

If you have Windows Vista Ultimate or Home Premium you have some great tools for recording various media.

You may already know that you can record movies from television with Windows Media Center. It’s probably one of the easiest things you can do with the program. But there are a couple of things to remember when you record a favorite movie from TV.

You need to set some general recording options to make sure you catch the entire movie. And second, there are two separate ways to record a movie: as it plays on live television or by setting up a request in the guide.

Microsoft has a web page which shows you how to do this, plus a load of other tips for getting more out of Windows Vista.

Take a look.

Windows 7 will be will be a major release, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer claimed on Thursday. It will be like Windows Vista, but more so.

“[I]t’s Windows Vista, a lot better,” said Ballmer during a Q&A session hosted by Gartner analysts at the research firm’s annual Symposium ITxpo in Orlando, Florida.

Gartner’s Neil MacDonald asked how Microsoft would walk the line between doing too much with Windows 7, risking the kind of compatibility problems that haunted Vista early on, and too little, which might give potential buyers an excuse to avoid the upgrade.

“Windows Vista is good, Windows 7 is Windows Vista with clean-up in user interface and improvements in performance,” Ballmer said. “Look, I’m not encouraging anybody to wait, I’d go ahead and deploy it right away. We didn’t have to go in an incompatible direction to make big strides forward. It’s a real release, because it’s a lot more work than a minor release. It turns out you can do more than just a minor release in what is essentially a two-and-a-half year period of time. There’s no reason to do just, quote, a minor release, in two-and-a-half years.”

On Tuesday, Mike Nash, Vice-President of Windows product management, said Windows 7 was the product’s official name. He called the operating system “evolutionary” but still a “significant” advancement. “It is in every way a major effort in design, engineering and innovation.”

Ballmer defended Vista’s first two years in the market, claiming that it has 80 million users. He understood that companies might decide to skip Vista and move straight from Windows XP to Windows 7. “If people want to wait, they certainly can,” he said.