Paul Thurrott published the first part of his Windows Vista Release Candidate 1 Review

As I noted in my review of Windows Vista build 5536 (see my review), Windows Vista has suddenly turned a corner. Gone are the egregious and annoying bugs. Gone is User Account Control's most painful and frustrating behavior. Most application and hardware incompatibilities? Gone. Performance problems? Gone. What we're left with is a highly usable upgrade to Windows Vista with tremendous security and deployment advantages. And now anyone can get it, literally: Microsoft plans to ship RC1 to millions of people around the world beginning next week. If you want in with Windows Vista, your time has come.

As a backgrounder, I've been writing about Windows Vista for several years. During that time, my opinion of the product has bobbed and weaved dramatically, based on the events of the day and quality of the latest beta release. There were good times (PDC 2003) and bad (a year long layover between public builds), good builds (5536) and bad (Beta 1, Beta 2). There was good news (many features back-ported to XP) and bad (innumerable delays, dropped features, broken promises). And now, none of it matters. Now we have RC1, and it can stand or fall on its own merits. All around the Web, as you read this, geeky geeks are downloading, installing, and evaluating Windows Vista RC1. And if I had to guess, I'd say that most of those people are going to be quite happy indeed. In other words, this is the Windows Vista you were promised three years ago. This is the anti-Beta 2.

Windows Vista Release Candidate 1 Review, Part 1