Friday, September 01, 2006

Just a week after shipping a surprisingly stable, full-featured, and bug-free pre-Release Candidate 1 (RC1) version of Windows Vista, Microsoft has delivered the real thing. At 2:30 pm EST, the software maker unleashed Windows Vista RC1 to the public. And in the days ahead, an astonishing number of people will be running this Vista version.

In an RC1 briefing recently, Microsoft group product manager Chris Flores told me that the RC1 version of Vista is significantly improved over Beta 2, the previous public milestone of the product. It includes noticeably improved stability and performance, new functionality such as Tag browsing in Media Center and an IE feature that prevent incompatible toolbars from loading, vastly improved device coverage, and numerous other improvements, Microsoft says. Additionally, the controversial User Account Control (UAC) feature has been significantly changed to be less intrusive.

The RC1 build will time out in May 2007, Microsoft says, and the company will support it with critical updates and other patches through the final release of Windows Vista, which is slated for late October 2006.