Big news came Wednesday at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) when Steve Ballmer said that they would be releasing a copy of Windows 7 Beta that the public can actually get their hands on.

Microsoft announced last night that they've come up with with a name for Windows 7. You might be expecting something along the lines of "XP" or "Vista," but they aren't going that route this time around.

Last week we saw a revamped version of Paint in the third Windows 7 milestone. At the time there weren't any other screenshots available, but it looks as though someone who got their hands on Windows 7 M3 has decided to post some screenshots showing off more of the enhancements.

Here you thought that Windows 7 wasn't going to bring that "killer" feature we've all been waiting for. Well, you were wrong... big time! The third milestone of Windows 7 has been shown off to what appears to be a small group of people, and in it users are noticing that apps like Paint and Wordpad are adopting the Office 2007 Ribbon style interface.

After a lot of silence by Microsoft they have finally created a blog that will serve as a hub for Windows 7 information. The Engineering Windows 7 blog published an introductory post yesterday stating their intentions.

Last night at the D6 conference both Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer sat down together for an interview. We've got two highlight videos from the conference below, and there were actually some interesting things brought up. What's even more surprising is that there were some jokes being thrown around.

Microsoft has been very quiet on what to expect from Windows 7, and that's to be expected after they over-promised on Vista thereby leading to a lot of disappointment. Despite Microsoft's best efforts to keep things under wraps they still have a hard time dealing with leaks, and if rumors are right there's yet another milestone right around the corner.

Long Zheng managed to get his hands on what appears to be a Windows 7 Start Menu mockup, and how he came about it is quite interesting. An anonymous tipster sent the image which was retrieved from a private Windows feedback survey regarding the search functionality in Vista.

A few different people have posted screenshots of Windows 7 Milestone 1, which is a very early look at what's supposed to be released in 2009 or 2010. The last time we saw screenshots of Windows 7 Milestone 1 there wasn't really anything that exciting, but a Russian site (English translation by Google) has really busted the lid off of any mysteries.

With all the buzz surrounding Windows 7 in the last two weeks it comes as no surprise that there is a supposed leaked copy floating around the Internet. Torrent sites quickly picked up on the "leaked" version of Windows, and after that it started to spread like wildfire.