Vista is approaching its RTM (release to manufacturing) in time for its availability to consumers by early 2007. I installed Beta 2 on my under powered laptop when it was released to the public, and found it a little bit too unstable for use. I haven’t installed it since (and don’t intend to), but I thought it might be a good idea to see what the consensus was in reviews of RC2 - a kind of ‘meta review’ This is a big battle ground with Linux, and something that MS has to get right if it wants big adoption of Vista.

Oliver Rist is impressed:

Overall, however, RC2 does show more stability than RC1, and I was able to survive more than a week on that, no problem. All my peripherals and network devices were fully supported and most were discovered and installed automatically. Graphics are hungry, but if you feed them a good video card they’re crisp and happy.

Piotr Slabosz says:

There are still some small bugs, and the bigger problem that not every program works with Vista for now.

Gomeler gives the lowdown on the bug situation:

On September 22nd there were 2479 open bug reports and this number has dropped down to just over 1400 in recent days. Microsoft has said they will require there to be fewer than 500 bugs for Vista to launch. This may sound like a large amount of bugs but it is simply a product of mass production. These bugs will hopefully continue to be fixed over the course of the year before Service Pack 1 for Vista planned to be released next Fall.

These views seem to be consistent with the general picture building up; stability in Windows Vista has got much better as the release cycle has neared its end. Compatibility remains an issue (there were a number of programs which did not work in Beta 2 when I tried it, such as ZoneAlarm). It would seem that there is still work to do as far as stability in Vista is concerned, but it looks like it will get there.