Vista RC1: looks good but boots s-l-o-w?

Unveiled over the weekend, Windows Vista RC1 comes barely two weeks after Microsoft?s release of the pre-RC1 build 5536 - which was in itself an impressive ?interim build? that by all rights could just as easily have been dubbed Beta 3.

Indeed, you?ve got to look very hard to detect the differences. Most of the changes take place under the hood - Microsoft says that its tossed more device drivers into the pot, along with tweaking performance. We can vouch for the later: pretty much everything you do in Vista RC1 is snappier and more responsive than previous milestone builds.

However, boot time remains the same finger-drumming minute-long snoozefest as previous builds. We loaded a standard Vista Ultimate RC1 installation onto a 1.7GHz Pentium M system with 512MB of RAM (ie, a typical off-the-shelf system for today?s mainstream users) and clocked 56 seconds from cold boot to the desktop.