Paul Thurrott published part 2 of his Windows Vista review
In preparation for this portion of my Windows Vista Release Candidate 1 (RC1) review, I went back and re-read my compatibility report for Windows Vista Beta 2. I'm a bit surprised that I wrote that Beta 2 compatibility was "excellent" overall, though I must have mean that only in the context of previous betas.Windows Vista Release Candidate 1 Review, Part 2
Yes, that's my story and I'm sticking with it.
The reason is simple. In RC1, hardware and software compatibility is, in fact, excellent. But it's excellent in ways that previous Vista pre-release builds were not. It's excellent even when compared to Windows XP, and I don't write that lightly. It's just excellent, with no caveats.
OK, there is one caveat. If you try to install an x64 version of Windows Vista, well, God help you. I have no idea what Microsoft was thinking with these products, but after getting over my initial euphoria at how good the hardware support was, I descended quite quickly into software compatibility hell. So unless I mention it explicitly, all the good news here applies solely to standard 32-bit (x86) Vista versions. The x64 stuff is still a nightmare. My guess is that it will always be a nightmare. So unless you have some specific workstation-type needs for more than 4 GB of RAM and very specific applications, please just skip out on x64 Vista versions entirely. There's no happy ending there and your sanity hangs in the balance.
