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Windows Vista Release Candidate 1 Review, Part 2
Wednesday, September 6th, 2006
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.
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. Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows: Windows Vista Release Candidate 1 Review, Part 2: Compatibility
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