All of you, who are eagerly awaiting the release of Windows 7, might like the following statement, made by Ray Chen, president of Taipei-based Compal Electronics Inc., at an investor's conference today. Regarding the question when it is being shipped with PCs, he said: "According to current planning, it should be late September or early October." Compal builds laptops for Hewlett-Packard and Acer, among others.

This is interesting news, as Microsoft officially talks only about January 2010 as a release date for Windows 7, so far. This somewhat conservative date might be used as a cushion to soften any unexpected delays in its current development process, though. Therefore, recent news about Microsoft's announcement of only one public beta and one RC before the RTM version would support the statement Chen made today.

The current beta version of Windows 7 seems to be surprisingly stable and well performing already and received prevalently good reviews throughout the whole IT community during the last weeks and months.