Stick A Fork In Vista, It's Done!

Finally!  Windows Vista has been released to manufacturing at last (with a build number of 6000.16386.061101-2205, if you're a trivia hound).

As a certain dead rock star once said, what a long, strange trip it's been.  The trip to Vista has been long and difficult, and it was disheartening to see Microsoft fall back and retrench as many times as they did.  A great many features that were meant to make the final cut had to be dropped, reworked, or abandoned entirely.

But what has been delivered is in many key ways a solid improvement on XP, and in a few key ways a massive improvement.  It's a mixture of the incrementalism that was Windows 95-to-98, and the revolutionary changes that was 98-to-XP.  I lament the loss of the object-based file system that has been one of Microsoft's goals for nigh on a decade now, but I welcome the indexed search (which actually works and isn't just something hastily wedged in sideways), the heightened security (although I doubt we'll see the real benefits of that until Vista is the prevalent Windows OS), and many other things, big and small, that make Vista what it is.

I'm using RC1 on my notebook and plan to upgrade it via a clean install when the gold code drops into my lap.  From there I'll eventually -- eventually -- upgrade my desktop machine after I make a number of checks to insure certain programs still work properly.  It's done, but I'm in no hurry to upgrade completely; XP isn't going anywhere, and probably won't be for the next few years.  That and I'm betting most of the upgrades to Vista will be passive -- i.e., people buying PCs pre-loaded with Windows, which is the way it's been for quite some time.

I have to be realistic.  If Microsoft had tried to deliver Vista with all the features that they originally promised, with the problems they experienced, we might not even have seen a working Beta 1 yet.  I don't think they realized just how much they were trying to bite off until it was too late, and they had to scale back before committing themselves to delivering something that might simply have been unusable.

Congratulations, everyone.  Now take some time off.  You've earned it!