On Friday, October 5, Microsoft made Windows Vista Release Candidate 2 (RC2) available to beta testers. While company representatives had conceded that the earlier Release Candidate 1 wasn't being seriously considered as a candidate for gold code, I'm told RC2 could be a real contender. Naturally, my expectations were high: builds have been improving notably in quality since beta 2, and time is short if Microsoft is going to meet its currently targeted launch dates of November for enterprise customers and January for consumers.

My experience with RC2 turned out to be a roller-coaster ride. Installation on my usual desktop and notebook test systems was quick and painless, requiring only about 30 minutes thanks to Microsoft's new image-based setup. I was eager to get started with what I hoped would be a production-quality product with just a few rough edges left to smooth out. But shortly after logging in, I encountered painfully sluggish performance, as well as some interface glitches of a sort that I haven't seen for months. As you'll see in our walkthrough, one of my systems was plagued with problems like screen-redraw bugs and vanishing icons.

I can't be certain these glitches are evidence of problems in Vista itself rather than, for example, display drivers on my system. But I didn't consider it a good omen. My first few hours using Vista RC2 on my desktop system were, frankly, frustrating. I'm thoroughly accustomed to the shortcomings of pre-production software, of course, but I was expecting better from something dubbed "Release Candidate".

After I finished installing and configuring all my essential software and rebooted the system, the problems vanished. And, stry, I was unable to reproduce most of them on my notebook. As I settled in and began using the machines, it felt comfortable. Performance still doesn't seem as snappy as I'd like, and operations like sleeping and resuming sometimes—though not always—take surprisingly long to complete. But on the whole, RC2 seems stable and usable. The applications I need are running fine. Consequently, I'm beginning to temper my negative first impressions.

So is RC2 ready for release? If my experience is at all typical, it's not there yet. I expect Microsoft knows it still has work to do and that we'll see at least another interim revision of RC2, as we did for RC1, if not a full-blown RC3, before the company makes the decision to ship Vista en masse.

For a closer look at some of my experiences with RC2, check out our online walkthrough. We also show you what the RC2 installation process looks like.