Vista RC1

Yup, its official.

Lukas blogged it, Mauricio blogged it, Nigel blogged it, JB blogged it and now its my turn.

Vista RC1 was officially released over the weekend.

I upgraded to the RC1 build on Friday from build 5472 and noticed a number of changes.

Given I'm still on the live bandwagon, I was pleased to see that the Welcome Center gives you links to get some of the core live services such as Live Mail Desktop Beta, Live toolbar and Live Messenger.

 Other improvements include solid driver support - I have support for Aero and glass on my M400 without having to mess around with drivers.  It also seems faster, more stable and I've had zero crashes with the new build (I actually haven't had a bad run at all on Vista - YMMV).  There is still a little bit of work to be done - e.g. when my machine wakes up from suspend the video drivers seem to go on holiday (easy to fix on the fly) but otherwise it works good.

I'm on Vista full time now and enjoying it.

Oh - and I dont have to install .Net 3.0 - its already there!  It makes it easier to demo developer technologies.

You can also get the .Net framework for Windows XP from here and the SDK from here (warning - large).

tags: Windows+Vista, Vista, RC1, Aero