Thanks to an anonymous poster on my blog for posting this! As always, this could be fake, so take it with a grain of salt, but if it's real, then it means Microsoft has already started compiling builds for Windows 8! This actually wouldn't be too far-fetched since they've started cooking up Windows 7 SP1 builds lately. This would also imply that the RTM build of Windows 7 is soon to come and will probably be rounded up to build 7500... of course, that's if this shot is real in the first place! Either way, tell me what you think. Here's the build string and the screenshot the anonymous poster posted (care to hook me up with the build? =) ):
Just to note, one way I think it could be real is that early builds still have the labeling from the OS before it, so instead of saying Windows 8, this would still say Windows 7. On the other hand, one way I think this could be fake is because of the, "Current Version" in regedit: Version 7.0. I know that Microsoft has displayed interest in only changing the minor numbers so as to keep from conflicts with applications that check your OS version. Technically, Windows 8 would be either 6.2 or 6.1.1, but strange things happen during development and this may not be the tell-tale sign of a fake. Either way, it's exciting for the moment. =)
Update: A commenter noted something of interest in that this build appears to be using approximately 3.9 GB of disk space. The only saving grace with that not being fake would be that - even though it says Ultimate - this particular build compile doesn't contain all the binaries that typically go into Windows Ultimate. That's not out of the realm of possibilities and I'm still hopeful that this is legit, but I'm certainly not going to bet the farm on it yet...
