What’s the difference between a CTP, RTM, and RC?

 
So i’m installing Windows Server 2008 R2 maybe two or four times LOL…and I see that they Evaluation Build 7100 is still on the frickin’ desktop. WTH? I always heard, by the way, that an eval build will not accept a key. Wrong. Mine happily did, and more than once. Anyway, I thought that this o/s was released,  but apparently it’s only a Release Candidate; if it fails with a certain level of bugs it won’t go to full Release to Marketing, or RTM, but it’s a reasonable facsimile of what you’ll get when the thing finally gets dumped on the market. The RTM for Windows Server 2008 R2 won’t be out, according to a Windows guru that works at Sogeti, until the end of Summer 2009. A Community Technology Preview (CTP), of course, is a half-baked version of what the software might look like in six months or a year’s time, which should only be installed on test machines or VMs.

Bottom line – pay attention to what the **** you are doing and you won’t have to install Windows over and over again like me, thinking that you had the wrong ISO downloaded or whatever.

Lee

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