Windows Vista Build 5728

Wow, what a journey it's been.

The first build of Windows Vista I got my hands on was the December 2005 CTP (5270 IIRC) and the progress made in the time since then is rather astonishing. Since then I've gone through builds; 5308 (Feb CTP), 5342, 5365, 5381, 5384 (Beta 2), 5456, 5472, 5536, 5600 (RC1) and as of this morning 5728.
 

When we received 5536 it became clear how close Vista was to being ready for release, before that there were many unanswered questions and things that left me wondering sometimes if Vista really would make it out the door. Sure it looked good, felt faster and more responsive than that somewhat horrible Beta 2 build but you got the feeling if you pushed it too hard the whole thing would fall over.
 

Coming back to the very impressive build 5728, it installed in a speedy 16 minutes. Having spent all day using, its easy to feel the improvement over RC 1, speed, responsiveness and stability.
 

There are no new features in these later Vista builds, but the work that's being done on fit and finish is very apparent now. Things like changes to icons, all the icons in the User folder have been replaced and the little things you pick up on that just make using Vista better.

 

When I installed Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh on RC1 it made Office run very slowly, but now that problem is gone and all the Office applications open as close to instantly as possible.
 

I was pleased to note Microsoft had listened to the advice of the testing community and inserted the option to disable the Windows start-up sound which was a real pain having to listen to especially if you had a laptop without hardware volume control.

I have Lord of the Rings Battle for Middle Earth 2 and Call of Duty 2 installed and both run better than they did on Win XP, faster and smoother.

Click to enlarge the thumbnails.
 

One of the best features is the Speech Recognition. Using it is like talking to a human. Some of us were lucky enough to be at  Geekzone 2006 and see Microsoft's Nathan Mercer show off the feature, it was impressive to say the least, given the previous speech demonstration debacle.

Windows Vista is so close to complete it is fun to use and I eagerly await the next interim build and then RTM. I have no hesitation is saying this will be the best Windows version yet. Before anyone try's knocking it... use it first. Sick of the Linux community rubbishing Vista without trying it, but maybe they are jealous they haven't yet come up with a decent product.

Microsoft have also made this build available to the public. Download Windows Vista pre-RTM 5728 You will need a CPP (Customer Preview Program) key to use this build.