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Was it a limited release or something?


It was pulled down off the Customer Preview Program after a weekend according to this article. So the only way to get it currently is off MSDN or the beta site. Otherwise, you will have to find someone else who snagged RC2 off CPP when it was there, as the same cd key works on it.

RTM is currently set for November 8th last I heard, due to a last minute system crashing bug found. It was supposed to be done last week. But the delay shouldn't cause any rollout delays at this point, so by January the world can finally see what all the fuss was about.

I personally think they should have just kept on the plans to have Longhorn be a "XP Second Edition" and kept all the cool tech for Blackcomb. Now we have Longhorn that took years longer then expected, and it dropped all the cool ideas like WinFS. Even better would be for Microsoft to just scrap Windows, start from scratch (or build on a stronger foundation of something else) and throw compatibility into a little emulator of sorts in the new OS. Ala the OS X transition, throwing classic applications into an OS 9 box, and providing enough cookie crumbs to drag developers into the much better OS X environment. If they did this, they could properly kill the registry, win.ini and so much other legacy cruft turning the OS most of us have to deal with into a monstrosity.