Inside Windows Vista, Build 5308
eWeek has taken a look at the latest build of Windows Vista.beta
This release of Vista is “feature-complete”, the company says, meaning that all of the fundamental capabilities that Vista will eventually offer are now baked in.
Development efforts aren’t slowing—the user experience will continue to evolve, bugs will get fixed, performance and compatibility will improve—but the basic shape of the operating system has been solidified, and from here on out we expect to see mostly fine-tuning rather than wholesale changes.
We’ve been running this latest release, build 5308, for a couple of days now, getting a feel for its capabilities while Microsoft prepared to make it available to the community of MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) subscribers, TechNet users, and registered beta testers. Our expectations, set high by the quality of the previous December CTP (build 5270), were largely met.
We found this build of Vista is responsive and highly usable, though still far from bullet-proof (as is to be expected for beta software). Aside from some of the predictable problems with hardware-device support and still-buggy features, one particular problem was that Windows Explorer crashes frequently. To Microsoft’s credit, these crashes were hardly dramatic, since Explorer managed to restart itself and resume each time.
Some screenshots below and more at the original article.
