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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul



Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Vista RC1 A Major Improvement Over Beta 2

Andy Patrizio interviewed me for this Internet World story:
Activity around Windows Vista has kicked up quite a bit, with the first Release Candidate (RC1) hitting the mass market later this week and Vista pricing being officially unveiled.

Beta 2 was widely panned after its release last June, with many testers feeling there was no chance Microsoft would meet its year-end deadline.

Fast forward three months and more than 100,000 bug reports later. RC1 is in considerably better shape, according to testers.

"Beta 2 was a big disappointment in many ways," Paul Thurrott, editor of WinSuperSite.com, told internetnews.com. "I don't think it was the right thing to hand out to the public. A lot of people had a bad reaction to it. RC1 is stable, reliable, and performance is good. It will allow people to focus on what's different with XP."

Thurrott has posted two in-depth reviews on the best and worst of RC1.

Thurrott doesn't like the Sidebar and User Access Control (UAC), even though he said both are improved. Sidebar is so bloated it doubles the boot time, he said, and requires many steps to remove it from the system.

"What it is now is a toy. It's Active Desktop 2.0, and you have to go through a horrific number of steps to exorcise this thing from your system. It's incredible. It has no business coming on by default," said Thurrott.

As for the UAC, he said it's one of those things where Microsoft is finally doing the right thing with security but it's done so poorly it will turn people off. UAC is tacked on top of Vista instead of being integrated into the operating system.

He did have high praise for a feature of Vista that hasn't seen much attention, ReadyBoost. A USB Flash drive can be used as a cache of sorts in a low memory machine instead of a slower hard drive.
[ Posted at 7:38 PM | Permalink ]

 



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