The Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 downloads have hit TechNet

Anybody who’s ever spent any time on MSDN will immediately recognize the look and feel, if not the actual content for the preceding screencap. It’s from MSDN, and it shows that the official posting date for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 SP1 downloads as 2/16/2011 — even though this stuff didn’t actually show up until early today (2/17/2011) on the site.

There’s an .ISO image download for SP1 itself that will build a DVD for both x86 and x64 versions, but you can now also download slipstreamed versions of Windows 7 with SP1 included for all the major versions as well. Looks like we’re still on for SP1 to hit Windows Update next Tuesday on 2/22/2011. Stay tuned: I’m downloading the .ISO right now, and will install it on a couple of test machines as soon as the download completes (it’s 1.91 GB) and I get a DVD burned for it. Download traffic is pretty heavy, so I suspect my bits are in a traffic jam, along with everybody else’s!

[PostScript 6:22 PM 2/17/2011] I’ve gotten SP1 installed on my primary test machine (i7-940, 12 GB RAM, SSD system drive, 460 GTX graphics). It took just over 12 minutes to install and reboot to a running desktop. Everything seems to work just fine, except for a graphics driver hiccup while re-running the Windows Experience Index to see if anything had changed (it hadn’t). So far, so good…