Download Vista RC1 for free, stress your PC and wallet

I've had Vista RC1 for a few weeks now. Its great for people with high-end systems but I havent seen it run on a slower machine. it does look great though

New-computer purchase on an overloaded credit card is more my fear...

RC1 is much more stable and compatable (and less of a resource hog) than Beta 2 was.

I use RC1 32-bit as my primary OS on my laptop.

There are still some compatiblility issues (gametap won't install, DaemonTools won't install right), but I can see these problems clearing up in the future.

Still won't buy vista until service pack 1 is out though.

I've been running it for a while too - RC1 runs BF2 much smoother than Beta 2 did.

I'm running it on an Athlon 1.9ghz, and a GeforceFX 6600GT and 1GB of ram. Not top of the line specs these days, but it's quite snappy, and I've noticed no slowdowns from XP. I'm pretty impressed actually.

I have been running Vista since it came out as Beta 2 and have had no problems on my laptop. What's the worst that could happen? Well, I installed it on my most used machine, my desktop, and found that it could not sync with my PDA any longer (which is important to me) and bringing it back to Windows XP was hard as Vista installed remnants of the MBR on different hard drives on my computer. So, simply doing a drive wipe was not enough, and after installing XP (and removing Vista), it kept trying to load Vista. Bad. Took about four hours of troubleshooting before I got it back.

this is exactly the kind of consumer slavery im talking about!!!!
do you want to be cool?
well then be a good little consumer,go to work,spend your money on things that do absolutely nothing more than make the super-rich,super-richer.

and while your at stop at your local favorite media outlet,make some undeserving "entertainer" some money....

I've been testing Vista for several months now on a variety of computers, and I have to say the beta has come a long way.

Even when on a particular system, when the video card was not directly supported (during an earlier build), the operating system ran well with just the generic driver, although it's MUCH better with the correct driver.

I really like it, but it's totally different in some respects. Some features are completely buried.

which one is better 32 bit or 64 bit

robogamerx: In capitalism, purchases are made voluntarily. Those entertainers you believe are undeserving have earned their keep. If the product does not seem to you to be a good value for the money, there is no reason you have to purchase it.

And if they come out with Vista-exclusive games that you want? Well, it sounds like its value just went up with respect to you. Don't claim you are "forced" into buying it just because your choice is made difficult. Those in other situations who truly are forced (with guns and threats of imprisonment) into buying things might think you a bit spoiled.

Hey how long does the RC1 install last?

Vista RC1 is great, not taxing at all...at least if you turn off Sidebar and don't use IE7 (which is an absolute memory hog, darn tabbed browsing).

Other than that, no problems. (Most) Programs and Games I've tried are compatible and all my hardware works just fine.

And the beta lasts until June of 2007

wow this is terrible, it just laughed at me and said don't bother.

"Those in other situations who truly are forced (with guns and threats of imprisonment) into buying things might think you a bit spoiled."


wow

Been running vista for a few months as well, and I concur, it has come a long way since early betas. I'm running RC1 now, and Would have had it as my primary OS, if not for not having the installs for alot of my games working, and missing some CD keys. My PC is a Athlon 64 3200, 1 GB RAM, and a GeForce 6800GT.. and it's flawless, well as flawless as a beta can run.

I also run it on my laptop, which is meerly a 1.5 Ghz Pentium M, 512 MB Ram and a GeForce GO5200. It hangs and drags abit... and the battery gets sucked up fast. But I do run the thing with full Aero Glass on.

This is based on beta 2, although I'm downloading RC1 now to try out.

From what I've seen in Vista there is little reason to upgrade from XP. Just like there was/is little reason to upgrade from 2000. There hasn't been a giant functionality or stability jump since 98/nt4, although I have to admit, the jump from 98/nt4 to 2000 was huge.

That being said, when I tested this it ran fairly well on what I would consider a moderate modern computer. 2.0 Ghz, 512 ram, 40gb hard drive, intel graphics. No Aero Glass, but ran well enough to be used on a daily basis.

Vista does *not* require a new video card. It's video requirements are basically the same as XP. The difference is that if you want to run Aero you need a good video card. The 4 year old integrated intel chip I was testing this on had no problems running in the regular graphics mode.

I'm not sure this issue is especially relevant to people who use their PCs for gaming - if your PC can cope Oblivion without any trouble then it should be able to cope with Vista very easily. As I can attest, since I have Vista installed on this PC, and have recently been playing Oblivion...

One neat feature in Vista is the system rating - I think they call it the "Windows Experience Index", which is a grading of how capable your PC is. I presume this will go on games boxes. On installing Vista, I noticed that my overall rating was low - 2.3 - and that this value was being limited by the speed of my memory. I realised I still had an old, slow DIMM installed, replaced it, and now my machine is rated at 3.8 (and limited by hard disk speed). This small action resulted in a noticable performance increase in some of my games. I wouldn't have previously considered that memory and hard drive speeds were being such a bottleneck.

I personally love the OS, a lot of my annoyances with previous versions of windows have been fixed, and a lot of positive things have been put in (although I'm still not sure about the value of the "Games" section - maybe that will be more useful when the "Games for Windows" thing kicks off).

One irritation is that some games aren't supported yet (KOTOR for example) - however, there appear to be plans afoot to fix this, and anyway compatability modes sometimes help.

Generally, Vista has been a good experience for me.

i would also like to throw out there that vista rc1 adds some pretty nice media center functionality to the xbox360, and it's vastly improved over media center edition 2005 in terms of bugs and performance. and it's free right now, and lasts through until next year. note though that this is something that's really only been working since rc1, and was what prevented me from running vista on my desktop (as opposed to my laptop, which has been running vista since may). and i'm actually such a huge nerd that i have video up on youtube of what it looks like.

video 1 of 3
video 2 of 3
video 3 of 3

i should probably also mention though that i'm running a fairly beefy setup on the desktop though. but as mentioned rc1 is much more stable and much less resource greedy than beta 2 was.

ok, so my links didn't work the first time.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=IhqBIKYrAbc
http://youtube.com/watch?v=E78wuyFI7hM
http://youtube.com/watch?v=UjM96Kr5v-M

*Cough* OLD! First of September old.

Ty loads aegies for those vids though.

Vista Build 5728 post RC1 is already out:
http://download.windowsvista.com/preview/rc1/en/download-5728.htm

For the record, RC1 is 5600. Anyways, it has a few performance increase in a few places, but other things like the side bar seem to hang up a bit.

Yes, you can still use your trusty Beta 2/RC1 keys.

For computers that are even decent gaming systems under Windows XP, I don't think hardware capabilities are going to be the real problem with Windows Vista; for me, the real problems thus far with Release Candidate 1 have been driver-related. For example, my perfectly adequate Sound Blaster Audigy card (the "Gamer" version) is and will apparently remain useless for Windows Vista; Windows Vista RC1 does not include support for it, at least some Windows XP drivers seem to be unusable by Windows Vista, and Windows Vista RC1 absolutely refuses to allow me to use a beta driver intended for Windows Vista Beta 2 because the driver is not signed. I am not even certain if that driver would work with my particular Audigy card and Windows Vista RC1 anyway, but the fact that Windows Vista RC1 blocks the installation absolutely, not even allowing post-warning installation at the discretion of the system administrator, prevents me from finding out.

i have had no problems whatsoever with vista. in fact i am reading this blog with my main machine running vista. i love it and am unwilling to switch back

Posted by "tlozwarlock": "Vista RC1 is great, not taxing at all...at least if you turn off Sidebar and don't use IE7 (which is an absolute memory hog, darn tabbed browsing)."

Is that a joke or is your system buckling--perhaps with fans whirring and smoke pouring out of it--under the incredible demand of . . . tabbed browsing?

To #9...They say it takes around a half hour.
I installed it...But after I clicked "next" and it began its install, I watched a movie...So all I can confirm is it took under 2 hours. ;)


& to #4 - You are a complete douche for installing a beta OS on your main computer.

Vista will be great news for the gaming industry: everyone will need a cluster of a few XBox 360 in order to run it.

OTOH, Linux runs without problems on PS3, showing both more optimized an OS and more powerful a hardware. ;)

Not a joke, I IE7 is using 114mb of my ram right now, with 4 tabs open. Sad.

I've been using vista since the sad sad days of beta 1. Since the post-beta 2 builds its been wonderful, right now its my main os. My only complaint is that it doesn't recognize the tv tuner on my all in wonder 2006, though that's probably ATI's fault

Realize that there are different versions of Vista available as well. Vista Home Basic is, well, pretty much that - a basic OS. Vista Home Premium is the one with the Media Center and Aero Glass available.

Home Basic will run on just about any PC that's got a 1GHz processor, 512 MB of RAM, and 32 MB of video. What this means is that those two or three year old HP machines that have integrated video will NOT run Vista without updates.

For the gamers out there - if you can run Oblivion fairly well - 2 - 3 GHz processor, 1 GB of RAM, 128 MB video card - then you can run Vista Premium with Aero.

As for drivers - there are ALWAYS going to be drivers issues. Just because the O/S has been released - and your PC meets the specs - doesn't mean that Nvidia has written a driver for your two year old video card that works with Vista - yet. Or if they have, they haven't released it yet. The sheer number of permutations of systems that are available - printers, video cards, RAM, and processors - is staggering. Obviously it's going to take a little while to get things caught up for everyone. That's another reason why this is still in Beta - or RC1, as it were. They're making a good attempt to have a fully functioning OS to keep up with the increases in technology.

By the same token, if you're perfectly happy with your three year old system - then don't worry about trying to upgrade to Vista until you buy a new machine. XP works just fine, as we all know.

ATI's program seems a little biased. When I checked the "optimum" setting, despite my graphics card (an nVidia GeForce Go 6800) fufulling all of the individual requirements, it was still rated as a "fail" overall. Even better, on the "recomended" setting it was given a 4/5 rating, which was then downgraded to 3/5 (and thus below pass) for "optimum", while none of the other rankings changed. Not entirely suprising, given the competition, but perhaps something to watch out for, or note. Microsoft's own version is taking forever to check my system to try and get a theoretically more impartial view, but even without that...

A 3 year old HP would run Vista without Aero fine. The minimum requirement for regular graphics is a svga card. That means that if you can run your desktop in 800x600, you're ok to run Vista. Technically anyway. If all you can pull off is svga at best, I doubt that you've got 1Ghz or better CPU or 512 or better RAM.

Minimum requirements are

800Mhz CPU
512 RAM
SVGA GPU
20GB HDD (15GB free)
CDROM

And thats it. An old graphics card is not going to be a problem unless you want Aero.

I was using RC1 but had to uninstall it. On the second boot after installing my usual programs it was using all of my 1gb of ram for no reason on my brand new build. Loved it, but had to go back to XP.

Ah, you don't understand the new caching mechanism in Vista.

All (or as much as possible) RAM is used up for the cache. This isn't a problem since it doesn't take any more time to load a new program into the space compared to free RAM.

However, you get creamy faster loading for anything that happens to be in the cache.

The point is that your RAM is always used to make things smoother when possible. If you load something not in the RAM, it'll just fall back to the old way of loading it to RAM from the hard drive. It's a GOOD thing to use up the RAM in this manner.



Installation time is usually about 30 minutes for a clean install. An upgrade will take an aeon and half though.

No, it isn't. I forgot to mention that vista was running extremely, extremely slow while it was using all of my ram up.

The Microsoft system requirements tester wanted me to install SP2 before I could use it so that was out and the ATI said that I pass for minimum and recommended system requirements for Vista. But on the ATI optimal requirements, I failed becasue I have an nVidia 6800GS and not an ATI graphics card even though my nVidia card meets all the optimal requirements.

funny, I switched from Firefox to IE7 because Firefox is a worse memory hog....

@3, Crono 141

You said

"I use RC1 32-bit as my primary OS on my laptop."

and

"Still won't buy vista until service pack 1 is out though."

Now that is smart. Your not wanting to buy Vista until service pack 1, yet using the BETA version as your primary OS. Good move, now why didnt I think of that.

(PS, your RC1 will have expired before SP1 is out - What you going to do at that point? Go back to XP???)

i find it funny how people enjoy whinning for so little. If you don't like tabs, just don't use it! simple!

LINUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUX!!! Hell yeah.

.......tiger

if i download this is there a way to go back to XP and if so is it hard?

I'm running RC2 5744 on a dual boot with XP. My problem is that it hangs and will not respond, have to do a hard boot. My system is an Alienware P4, 3 ghz. 2 gig ram, 3 250 gig hard drives and a GeForce FX 5700 Ultra. The lock ups occor at random, anyone else having problems, I suspect the video drivers are the culprit, I've tried Nvidias lastest drivers and MS drivers, both behave the same. I havn't tried turning off the side bar. I check and see if it makes a difference.