Windows 7 Milestone 1 Ultimate Edition is alive, kicking and as real as they get! Although it's but one year away from the moment Windows Vista hit the shelves, and despite being in the final stages of development of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 and Windows XP Service Pack 3, Microsoft is also building Windows 7. At this point in time, Windows 7 is being dogfooded inhouse by Microsoft. However, the successor of Windows Vista was also shipped in an early stage to a select pool of the Redmond company's key partners.

On January 24, you were able to feast your eyes on the first ever leaked screenshots from Windows 7 Ultimate edition version 6.1 (Build 6519.1.x86fre.winmain.071220-1525), courtesy of ThinkNext. 
Because of numerous  accusations that the images
had been tampered with, and were fake, the Chinese blog posted the video embedded at the bottom of this article. Yes, this is Windows 7 Milestone 1 Ultimate edition 6519.1.071220-1525.

"I was about to share something interesting about Windows 7 in my last post, Windows 7: The Real Thing. The ISO image, installation, evaluation and the screenshots are all real. I mean there is no Photoshop or anything like that involved," reads a fragment from ThinkNext. "I'm not a person who makes himself complacent by faking something hot, neither will I be unhappy if someone denies the real information I posted. I don't mean to draw much attention, especially from those suckers. When I post images, there is Photoshop, when a piece of video, there is something called Premiere, or DreamWorks?"

In the video, you will be able to see the boot screen of Windows 7, as well as the desktop and a presentation of the new Windows Media Center that comes as a component of the next iteration of the Windows operating system. Users that are running Windows Media Center under Vista Home Premium and Ultimate SKUs will undoubtedly notice differences when it comes to the WMC running in the Ultimate edition of Windows 7. While the interface is approximately the same, the text size has changed, and so has the number of categories.

Windows 7 M1 comes, as all software under development from Microsoft, with an expiration date. Windows 7 M1 is time-bombed for May 2008. This only confirms the fact that the Redmond company will deliver Windows 7 Milestone 2 by May of this year.

"I don't think there is anything wrong, disappointing or weird that Windows 7 Milestone 1 isn't greatly different from Vista. It's only Milestone 1 so lots of code may be reused. Besides, even we can't see much visual changes (say, user interfaces), that doesn't mean Win7 internals don't change greatly. Here from the release notes, I read: 'the software will stop running on May 7, 2008. You may not receive any other notice. You may not be able to access data used with the software when it stops running'," added ThinkNext.