While Windows 7 has been undergoing testing for quite some time, there’d never been any issue with bugs until now because, well, that’s the point of testing. Unfortunately, now that the OS has hit RTM (release to manufacturing) any bugs people manage to find now will be in the OS when it ships.

The latest worry for Microsoft is a bug, discovered yesterday, that seems to be widely reproducible enough to garner some attention (though it seems only on machines with RAM weighing in around the 2GB mark). Fortunately for anyone out there running Windows 7, the whole thing is fairly easy to reproduce, so if you’d like to see how your system holds up, you can just follow these instructions from the Chris123NT blog that first reported the issue:

1. Run an elevated CMD prompt
2. Run CHKDSK /r
3. With task manager open, you should see your memory quickly gobbled away in the chkdsk.exe process until it either stops at or around 90% or it maxes completely out and crashes the computer.

While we doubt this’ll be a deal breaker for anyone looking to pick up Microsoft’s latest OS, it’s still a little worrying that things like this can seep through a testing process as widespread as Microsoft’s Windows 7 Beta program has been. For now there’s a lot of argument about whether or not the bug s an issue with Windows or with the hardware of all the users who’ve reported it as real.

Real or imagined, this kind of publicity is not doing Microsoft any favours.