Windows Vista: From unusable to desirable!

Paul Thurrott over at Windows IT Pro mag is gung ho about Windows Vista now. Amazingly, his stand has changed from (frequently and highly) critical to almost a Vista fan within a few builds. Self-admittedly so.

Here’s what he had to say about build 5536 in Windows IT Pro newsletter today.

I can say this. I’ve been very critical of the quality of Vista prerelease builds, and deservedly so. But that’s changed with last week’s release of Vista build 5536, which is a so-called “escrow” build for RC1. (Beta testers received build 5536 last Friday; MSDN and TechNet subscribers will get it some time this week.) The suddenness with which Vista has gone from unusable to desirable is quite shocking. With build 5536, the performance is amazing. All the bugs that have bedeviled me since Beta 2 and beyond are fixed. Hardware that never worked properly with Vista suddenly configures and works fine, with no user intervention. It’s like Microsoft flipped the “start working” bit. It just works.

Thanks for the update Paul – I was hoping it’ll get to be more like a shiny new Windows version real soon, but didn’t expect it to happen almost overnight like it did!

Catch up on build 5536 on Paul’s Supersite for Windows.