Bug found in Windows 7 RTM, delay rumors exaggerated

Microsoft today made the finalized version of Windows 7 available for download to TechNet and MSDN subscribers, announcing the right-on-schedule delivery on the official Windows Blog. At the same time, however, a recently-discovered memory bug is threatening to spoil the milestone as several sites are picking up the story and speculating about a possible launch delay.






While the bug has been called everything from critical to catastrophic, Windows division president Steven Sinofsky claims it is far from being a show stopper and joked about the blogosphere blowing things out of proportion.

The flaw is triggered when users run the CHKDSK command with the /r switch, which is designed to locate and repair bad sectors on a disk. According to reports, this should result in your memory quickly gobbled away by the chkdsk.exe process until it either stops at or around 90% or it maxes completely out and crashes the computer
. Though it is said to affect both 32 and 64-bit versions of Windows 7, it’s also not reproducible 100% of the time and apparently only affects systems with multiple hard drives or partitions.

Sinofsky still acknowledged the alleged flaw is something they must look into and that, for affected users, simply updating chipset drivers from the PC motherboard manufacturer may take care of the problem. Hopefully a fix will come ahead of the Windows 7 launch, but even if it doesn’t apparently it’s not serious enough to derail plans of an October 22 release.