Vista

OK, hit me, is there anywhere to still get Vista RC2 for download without having a developer/tester subscription, and is it really any better than RC1?

 

I believe you have to be an MSDN member, unfortunately. Besides, only minor improvements, most of the them under the hood. Not worth going out of your way for. There are really only two very obvious changes.
1. Borders on maximized windows are now colorized rather than black (big deal)
2. There's a new icon in the Control Panel that sets options for Sideshow, which isn't even an available feature on notebooks yet.
Other than that there isn't enough to persuade someone to not hold out for RTM.

 

u can probably try to find some cyberuser(s) who downloaded and hosted the version or ask a friend
the key in rc1 is still usable

for me it was quite an improvement from rc1, noting that
. many apps calling over from xp-partition are being handling much better, meaning better compatibility
. the installation is faster (one must perform a clean install, no upgrade),
. the security checking is a bit more transparent (not so many confirmation)

disappointing was that many device manufacturers were not quite ready for some beta drivers or falling behind after the beta driver in rc1

overall, good stuff, for an RC

cheers ...

 

Thanks for the replies. I spent a good bit of time last night trying to torrent it with no success. I think I may just poke around with RC1 some more.

 

Depends on where you search, but, we can never under estimate the power of the internet . You can find RC2 (32-bit since you are on a Core Duo) enlightenment here. (And your product key for RC1 works with RC2)

 

RC1 has it too.

 

Huh. Wonder why I missed that the first time. And qhn is right. There were a couple of games and news readers I installed that seem to have less compatibility problems. Forgot about that one.

 

The cosmetic differences in RC2 seem minimal over RC1, but I have noticed a number of speed and functionality improvements. Several programs I had errored out with RC1 that now work fine with RC2, not sure as to the exact reasoning but its progress none the less.

I also noticed a good speed boost in the installation and it boots slightly faster for me. (I ran them side by side on 2 T43P laptops when it came out to see what changes I could find) And finally I saw about a 5% reduced page file usage when selecting a system managed size with RC2, can't speculate as to why but it’s nice to know it needs less, or at least thinks it does =)