Windows 7 was shipped in the following SKUs: Contrary to popular belief, the previous codenames of Blackcomb and/or Vienna refer to an earlier effort intended to succeed Windows Vista, which was canceled in early 2007 due to time and feature constraints, and was instead replaced with the Windows 7 project. The kernel version acted as the project's codename, and was eventually used as the final name as well.

The name 'Windows 7' comes from the major version number of Windows Vista (6.0) being incremented by one, with the 7.0 kernel version being used internally for several weeks before shortly being bumped down to 6.1 around the time of build 6469's compilation. Windows 7 drops the ability to upgrade from Windows XP, requiring at least Windows Vista. It is the last version of Windows that supports processors without PAE, SSE2 and NX, and is the last to receive a Service Pack from Microsoft.Ī pre-RTM build, 7600.16384, was speculated to be the final version of the product but had a flaw in Internet Explorer 8 which prevented it from shipping. For Professional and Enterprise users, paid extended support ended on 10 January 2023. Mainstream support ended on 13 January 2015, while free extended support ended on 14 January 2020. It replaces Windows Vista and was replaced by Windows 8. Windows 7 is the first version to support upgrade paths to Windows 8, Windows 8.1 or Windows 10 and the only version to support upgrade paths from Windows Vista. It is one of Microsoft's most popular operating systems, still running on 5.39% of desktop and laptop computers as of February 2023.

Windows 7 improved performance on older hardware, while also improving many areas of the Aero user interface. Windows 7 has NT kernel version 6.1, making it a minor update to Windows Vista. It is intended to fix many of the issues users perceived with Windows Vista.

It is the eighth operating system in the Windows NT operating system line. It was released to manufacturing on 22 July 2009 and made generally available on 22 October 2009. Windows 7 is an operating system developed by Microsoft.

Windows 7 release date