Windows 7 to launch October 23rd?

Is Windows 7 less than six months away from its official launch? That’s the skinny from Acer’s UK marketing director Bobby Watkins, who over the weekend told UK site Pocket Lint that “23rd October is the date the Windows 7 will be available.”

Watkins, who by the time you read this could be Acer’s former UK marketing director or at least their new mailroom boy, was talking up Acer’s forthcoming Z5600 all-in-one PC with a 24-inch HD screen, inbuilt TV tuner and Blu-ray drive and up to 2TB of storage.

Watkins said that Windows 7 would be pre-loaded onto the Z5600, which was expected to arrive in stores as a teasing look-and-touch demo at the end of September. He then told PocketLint that the Z5600 would go on sale on October 23rd, when Windows 7 was officially released.

He also noted that there would be “a 30 day upgrade time so that customers don’t (have to wait) wait to buy a new computer. If you buy during that 30 day period you’ll get a free upgrade to Windows 7”.

While Microsoft has long been soft-pedalling with an “early 2010” the delivery date for Vista’s successor the company recently confirmed that Windows 7 would ship before the end of this year.

The rapid progress from the impressively mature Beta 1 in January to the polished Release Candidate available for public download this Wednesday (albeit already leaked to BitTorrent a week ago) indicates that an October ship date would be more than feasible, although the code would need to be signed off some six weeks prior to get it into the hands of OEMs for customisation as well as allow time for retail DVDs to be printed, packaged and delivered onto the shelves.

(Of course, Microsoft could fast-track the OEM delivery and launch Windows 7 on that date along with a flotilla of new desktops and notebooks but not have the Windows 7 retail boxes hit the streets for some weeks later).

There’s no significant reason that October 23rd is better or worse than any other nearby date, but if Microsoft wants to help its hardware partners gear up for the traditional Christmas sales spike for new PCs – even one that’s expected to be significantly softer this year – then the last week of October is as good a bet as any.

For those who care about such things, October 23 is also two days before the eight anniversary of the launch of Windows XP on October 25, 2001. It also marks the completion of the first miniature golf tournament (in Chattanooga, Tennessee) in 1930; the first appearance of The Smurfs in a Belgian comic magazine in 1958; and the 50th birthday of Weird Al Yankovic, who celebrated all things geek in White & Nerdy.