Ok, folks, as I reported this saturday, Vista RC 2 build 5744 is out. I was obviously one of the few to obtain it in time, because this Monday, only two days after making the Release Candidate 2 (RC2) version of Windows Vista available to the public via the Customer Preview Program (CPP), Microsoft pulled the download already. Anyway, according to sources Microsoft only plans about two more interim releases before it goes final. So one would expect that this version is damn close to the final product – although the official amount of bugs that still need to be fixed is 1400 (and counting). Well, I can report first hand that it still is *anything but close* to the final product.
In fact: today I installed it (dual-boot) on a spanking new HP Compaq DX2200 Pentium 4 2.8ghz HT testcomputer at my work and Vista was completely dead within the hour. It would not even safe-boot or anything. And the only thing we did was change from DHCP to a fixed IP… And what’s worse: I can reproduce the problem any time I want. I just do a clean install, boot into Vista, do an update and then change from DHCP to fixed IP. After a while I get all kinds of errors, then Explorer hangs and it’s all over.
And I’m talking about a brand new machine here: no old wacky hardware. It is just incredible.. And to make things weirder: at home I have RC2 running on a similar machine (also 2.8ghz HT) and I haven’t had any problems there yet!
With less than 4 months for the anticipated release I can state that I never had such mixed results with a release candidate for any OS. Microsoft *really* needs to pull their act together.
Update: C|Net has found Vista RC 2 also not ready to ship.
See also: Microsoft Pulls Vista RC2 Public Download