Windows Vista RC2 -- Finally Took The Plunge

I've been avoiding all of the Vista CTP/Beta/RC releases like the plague (I've installed 2 CTPs over the past year, and they were very early on): A) I just don't have time to keep up with them all and B) I just really don't have time to keep up with them all.  However with the announcement from Microsoft that RC2 will be the last publicly available release before Vista goes gold I decided to break out a spare drive and give it a shot.

Two words (from an aesthetic standpoint at least): Simply amazing.

Getting it installed however was anything but amazing.  Doing a fresh install simply refused to complete...I ran through the steps about half a dozen times and it would lock up at various points, usually during the Extraction phase, so that was a good 2+ hours wasted.  In the end, the only way I could get the installation to complete was to first install Windows XP, upgrade that to SP2, and then run the upgrade routine from the Vista DVD; even then the upgrade itself took almost 2 hours (and 6 automatic reboots).  In comparison, the fresh copy of XP I installed first took just over 20 minutes, even though the spare drive I'm using is a 20 gig guy running at a paltry 5400 rpm's on an ATA 133 bus (compared to my main SATA drive spinning at 10,000 rpm's, it's like molasses).  Quite frustrating despite all the hype around Vista installing in under 20 minutes...perhaps the RTM will be faster.

I finally got it booted up, and wow...this ain't the Vista from 6+ months ago.  It's absolutely gorgeous...of course the fact that my Vista Experience score is a 4.8 certainly helps (well, that's the average of all the scores...surprisingly my processor (AMD Athlon 3500+ 64 bit) had the lowest score of the bunch at 4.2, though the graphics system clocks in at 5.9.  The HDD (as expected) is next lowest at 4.3, though the 10K RPM drive should boost that at least a full point.  Regardless, it's very polished from a visual standpoint...still a few annoying flickers here and there (usually related to the UAC dialog popping up), but the smooth fades in and out during various operations are soothing to the eyes, and of course glass looks fantastic.  I'm currently using the graphite theme, but with the color intensity backed down to just under half.  Perhaps my favorite feature eye-candy-wise is the sidebar, which many have mixed feelings about.  I have a couple gadgets installed, but with the opacity on them set at 60% which really helps the whole sidebar blend in to the rest of the desktop quite nicely so it's not so glaring and in your face. 

Overall system responsiveness is snappy, and memory consumption is well within an acceptable range (even with most of the Windows Components for IIS7 installed and running) averaging about half a gig with a handful of applications running.  I haven't done any real heavy lifting yet with IIS or Visual Studio or whatnot, that will be for a future post.  I am, however, strongly considering updating my main drive to RC2 in the very near future, so of course I'd love to get feedback from anyone who's already done this.  Most of my work is done in VS 2005 at this point, but I do have to use 2003 from time to time.  I don't run any "exotic" applications so I'm assuming most of what I do have will be compatible.

So overall (from a high level perspective) I'm impressed, and UAC isn't really getting on my nerves as much as I thought it would.  Everything is just so damn purdy!