Labs Sees Light at the End of Vista Testing Tunnel

Review: Build after build (after build), eWEEK Labs has tested Windows Vista. With Build 5744—or RC2—Vista is on the threshold of release, and tests show that the OS is ready to come out fighting.

It's been a long and winding road, but the Microsoft Windows Vista release that's been floating vaguely in the near future (for years now) finally appears to be close at hand.

First, though, comes what eWEEK Labs hopes to be the last in an extended line of next-generation Windows client test builds: 5744, also known as Vista Release Candidate 2.

eWEEK Labs somewhat wistfully loaded up this release on our test rig, which is outfitted with an Intel Pentium 4 processor, 1GB of RAM and—so that we may dip our cup in the waters of Aero Glass—a beefy Nvidia GeForce FX 5950 Ultra graphics card.

We noted that our RC2 installation process ran somewhat slower than some past installs we'd undertaken (about 50 minutes).

This may have been because we did a clean install but opted not to wipe our partition clean. Rather, we allowed Vista's installer to move our previous installation, Build 5728, to a windows.old directory so that we could still access files from that incarnation.

That said, we saw very little difference in RC2 as compared with the last builds we tested, 5600 and 5728. These earlier builds delivered peppy performance, and our experience with 5744 was much the same.

Read the full story on eWEEK.com: Labs Sees Light at the End of Vista Testing Tunnel