So I’ve actually been meaning to write this for a while because it’s been annoying the hell out of me. I have seen people saying that 7105 and 7106 of Windows 7 are RC builds and the RC will be > 7100. Well all I can say to those people is that you’re wrong, you fail, and you need to learn how the development process works inside Redmond before you go spouting about a build being an RC ESCROW or now. There’s also the other camp (*cough* Thurrott *cough*) that seems to think that Microsoft is strictly working on RC and have not let winmain continue building towards RTM. Again, learn how the process works before you talk. Ok so now I will attempt to explain all of this so you guys can walk away from reading this post knowing how it works in Sinofsky’s lair. Basically, after build 7076 the tree was split. 7077 was compiled as an RC ESCROW build (winmain_win7rc) and the winmain lab bumped its build number up to 7105. 7077 and on are code frozen, meaning no feature changes will occur in that branch (the RC branch. This allows them to work out the bugs to deliver a high quality RC release. Any code changes internally are checked into winmain (7105 and higher at this point). So from that standpoint you could say that codewise future 71xx.winmain builds are newer than the RC will be as those builds are still receiving new check-ins from the various fbl labs. So for those who are wondering I will answer the question. 7105 or higher are NOT RC builds, but rather winmain builds pushing towards RTM. 7077, 7078, 7079, 7080 etc… are all RC ESCROW builds. When the RC has passed testing, they will compile the final RC build as 7100. Hope this clears up some of the confusion. As usual if you have any questions feel free to ask! UPDATE: The current situation has been clarified a bit to me. (Thanks to Tom W for this). Build 7106, which leaked the other day in chinese, is in fact 7076 with a revved up build number. So currently 7077 is the newest from a code perspective as 7106 does not contain the new visual style elements (updated taskbar buttons etc…) that are in 7077. So for all of you who have 7077, stick with it and don’t bother with 7106, it’s not worth the hassle of attempting to translate it. I really only did it myself to see if it was even possible. 7077 is re-installing on my laptop as I write this. Source
