Happily Running Windows Vista

Last night I upgraded to one of the newest internal builds of Windows Vista and, wow, it's definitely gone through some more polish. Problems I had on previous builds are gone (for the most part (not that there aren't some other new problems around having some questionable drivers)) and here I am actually posting from Vista. Sexy, sexy, sexy. It is shaping up to be one sexy product, that's for sure. There have definitely been quite the number of performances made between the first Beta 2 and the build I'm currently running on (it's fast, baby). (I honestly wonder what Scoble would think if he was able to see this latest build).

That reminds me, did y'all catch the news of what Mark Russinovich is working on now that he's a Microsoftie as well? Quoted from Mark himself: "For the near future I’ll be working with the client performance team analyzing and addressing Vista performance issues." That's pretty exciting to me. And with his skills, I'm sure it won't take long until he starts making an impact in that area.

I guess in one way, it's the small things that make me happy. The new screensavers, the new transparent windows in Aero, the new WindowsKey+Tab feature. My goodness, you HAVE to check out the new tabbing functionality once are up and running on RC1 of Vista when it comes out (you ARE going to upgrade, right?). I think I spent most of last night just tabbing through all my applications. It's a 3d view of your windows from a semi-side perspective, and all the transparencies are still there. Not only that, all the windows are still active. So, let's say I have a flash movie running in one window. If I activate the new tabbing window, the perspective will change AND the movie will continue to play. Very cool stuff!

Anyways, yeah, it's the small things that make me happy. That's not to say there are only small changes. Just you wait and see until you get your hands on all the new security/stability improvements in this version of Windows. In the sense that XP was a big step up from Windows 98, I think Vista is also going to be a big step up from XP. Remember though, this is just my opinion though :P.