Solved Release Candidate

[townsbg]

Did anyone try the Vista release candidate and if so which one?

Personally I tried RC1. RC2 was released much more discretely and went away quickly. I had trouble downloading RC1 though. After 2 or 3 failed attempts the server refused to allow me to download it again so I had to pay a few dollars for a DVD copy which came with both the 32 and 64 bit versions. Despite it being pre-lease I don't remember having any major issues with it.

 

[Ztruker]

???? Vista ????

 

[z3r010]

I must say it confused the crap out of me, I was hoping I'd missed something.

 

[townsbg]

I thought that the subject was self explanatory but if it is too confusing just delete it.

 

[z3r010]

Are you talking about Vista release candidates from 2006/7 that I think stopped working early 2008? if so why?

 

[townsbg]

I was feeling nostalgic and thought I'd ask.

 

[NoelDP]

I was involved in two Betas at the time - Vista and the new MS accounts package.
I had some horrible problems with the graphics card drivers in Vista until RC2, when they finally fixed them.
Problems also with my Hauppauge TV tiner drivers - Hauppauge refused to release even Beta drivers until after Vista went RTM.

I had a fight with MS over the accounts package, which insisted on running in an Admin account, contrary to all good practice - in the end I resigned in disgust from that beta. I can't even recall what it was called now!

 

[Jody Thornton]

I never used any RCs for Vista. There was one Longhorn beta though that was supposed to be a dead ringer for Windows XP (it was based on the Windows Server 2003 code based, and I would love to have found it.

 

[townsbg]

I never used any RCs for Vista. There was one Longhorn beta though that was supposed to be a dead ringer for Windows XP (it was based on the Windows Server 2003 code based, and I would love to have found it.

I doubt that was ever public. For part of the development they did base Vista off of XP but then scrapped it and started over basing it on 2003.

 

[NoelDP]

Put it this way - I saw a demo of Longhorn waaay back in mar 2003 and it was nothing like XP even then, although it probably had a lot of legacy code in it to make it run.

 

[Jody Thornton]

Actually I have a bookmarked page at home that has links to the beta build. It defintely was (and is documented to be) Win2003 based.

 

[townsbg]

Actually I have a bookmarked page at home that has links to the beta build. It defintely was (and is documented to be) Win2003 based.

It was initially based on XP but suffered from feature creep until Microsoft scrapped it and started over basing it on 2003.

 

[NoelDP]

Not quite - Vista was always planned as a ground-breaker, but got caught up in the 'Trusted Computing' stuff when Blaster came out.
As a result all dev work on Vista was shelved until Win XP SP2 was released in 2004 - and the changes were so deep-rroted that they almost had to start from scratch.
It's for this reason that Vista eventually released in a mad rush at the end of 2006, rather than in the normal manner in 2004.

Anyone who tells you that Vista is 'based on' either XP or 2003 is basically using the wrong organ