Follow the instructions as shown in the video. Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, 2009.[10] It is the successor to Windows Vista, released nearly three years earlier. Windows 7's server counterpart, Windows Server 2008 R2, was released at the same time. It was succeeded by Windows 8 in October 2012.