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Windows Vista RC1: First impressions
Tuesday, September 12th, 2006
Last week we got our hands on Windows Vista Release Candidate 1, which we’ll start putting 
through its paces, but we thought we’d pass along our early impressions, in part based on a meeting with Greg Sullivan, the Microsoft group product manager for Windows marketing communications.
To begin with, Sullivan sat us down in front of Vista running on a Toshiba notebook with 1GB of RAM and an Intel 945 graphics processor. The GPU was carving out part of the main memory for its video functions. Now, based on testing in the GCN Lab, the Intel graphics chipsets usually leave something to be desired in the performance department (notebooks with ATI or nVidia processors, for instance, routinely outperform notebooks without). And performance will be a key requirement for running Vista at its highest level.
But we were pleasantly surprised, for example, by how well the Vista Aero Glass feature ran on the notebook. That’s the feature with the cascading application windows and other bells and whistles. (And for those of you who’ve come to love that cascading window feature, which lets you flip through open windows via a 3-D, on-screen Rolodex-type interface, Microsoft has improved on it in RC1, spreading the windows out more so you can better see what you have open.)
Sullivan told us Microsoft did a lot of work on Vista performance between the last beta version and now–and it shows. But to be clear, Microsoft doesn’t intend for Vista to perform better than Windows XP. According to Sullivan, Microsoft had two choices with Vista: Make it faster, or make it as fast as XP while running important behind-the-scenes features like Windows Defender that require processing power but make the overall computing experience better. Microsoft chose the latter. "We chose to be as fast and do a lot more," Sullivan told us. Windows Vista RC1: First impressions
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