Vista Pre-RC1 Build Released

The Windows Vista Team Blog announced that a pre RC1 build 5536.16385 (to be precise) has had a limited release - it doesn't say who can get a copy, but RC1 is due very shortly anyway.

I run two laptops - my production one and a demo/test one, until this week the production one has always been Windows XP, but after testing 5536 for a while, I felt that it was better than XP (for myself and the apps I run).  So I now run this build on both machines and on my home desktop - it's a positive step forward.  In general it feels faster than XP now (which is the main reason for getting rid of XP for me) and I just like and have got used to the new UI - in particular I like the integrated search and have almost stopped navigating the start bar in favour of just typing the first few characters of the program I'm after e.g. type "NOTE" to find notepad.exe or "PERF" to find the "Reliability and Performance Monitor" tool, take a look at the 'resource overview' in this tool - it's much more detailed than Task Manager.  Downloading large files from the Internet or Network also seem way faster...but that's a story for someone else I know to tell.