"I bought a new computer and upgraded to the Vista pre-RC1 version; then on Saturday upgraded to RC1. And it works. Not only does it work, but it works very well, and by the time Microsoft gets rid of any remaining wrinkles it will be great. The interface is as good as the best from Apple, in fact probably better," said Dermott Renner, owner of Starsoft Computers, Auckland, New Zealand. "Beta 2 did not have a great many drivers but this has been fixed in RC1 and I am sure will be extended even further in the released version. RC1 is pretty fast and snappy performance-wise, it seems as fast as Windows XP. The boot-up and shutdown times are faster than XP. And I think a lot of people will try Vista's ReadyBoost option where you plug in a USB key and Vista uses it to cache frequently used files to."
Most partners said they are pleased with RC1's improved driver support but note that more drivers are needed before the rollout is possible.
"Vista RC1 is dramatically better than beta 2," said Tim Huckaby, CEO and President of Interknowlogy, a Carlsbad, Calif. custom application developer. "RC1 is faster than Windows XP in most of the spots I can see. Vista has everything you need to run in production - even on a notebook. I can understand that some third party drivers are not available yet and frankly that is going to be an issue for another year as Microsoft waits for the 3rd party vendors to do their drivers."
Two Microsoft partners said the new user interface will drive adoption, and hopefully the development of more drivers.
"I have been playing with RC1 and pre-RC1 since they came out. Both seem very solid. Not perfect, but solid," said Andrew Brust, CTO of New York-based consultancy twentysix New York. "The biggest issue, as with any new OS release, is driver compatibility and availability. On my ThinkPad T42, which is not branded as Vista-compatible, things are smooth and speedy, although without the Aero Glass video effects. I really like Vista. It hurts a little when I have to go back to XP."
"RC1 is that it is surprisingly complete, stable, fast and usable. It is a great move forward from Beta 2. Beta 2 was too slow to really enjoy it, but RC1 just flies," said Lars Riehn, president of infoWAN, a Microsoft Gold Certified advanced infrastructure partner in Munich, Germany. "I am still finding minor issues here and there, but nothing truly major. What I am hoping for is that all the hardware vendors now start publishing Vista drivers for their hardware and ideally even more drivers get included in the RTM version of Vista."
One consultant said RC1 is not yet fully optimized but gives partners and customers a good working copy for testing features and identifying the system resources they will need to run the upgrade.
"I have had RC1 for a couple of weeks now installed on both a laptop and desktop and it's a big improvement over Beta 2 as far as stability and performance are concerned. Both the clean install and upgrade scenarios worked on each machine and on a machine that would not successfully install Beta 2, said the consultant, who asked not be named. "I would not want to run it with less than 1GB of memory, probably 2GB. Processor speed is less of an issue. HDD footprint with everything installed is pretty large, so I'm thinking at least 60GB for a laptop, maybe 80GB."
