With Release Candidate 1 expected in the near future, Microsoft quietly produced another interim release. Microsoft continues to focus on polish and overall improvement in compatibility, stability, and performance in Build 5536.

This weekend, Microsoft quietly produced a new interim release of Windows Vista, build 5536, which is available to select beta testers. Build 5536 is the first release we've seen that's officially on the RC1—Release Candidate 1—branch of the Vista code base. With RC1 itself expected in the near future, we haven't tested build 5536 aggressively, since the actual RC1 code will provide the best indication of how close Vista is to being truly ready for the marketplace. But, of course, I did install build 5536 to get a sense of the progress Microsoft has made since build 5472, the last release I covered in depth.

So far, build 5536 has behaved fairly well and seems to run snappily. Aside from my inability to install some applications, the biggest problem I've encountered in this release is that resuming from sleep has been unreliable and extremely slow. Putting a computer to sleep only takes a few seconds, but resuming has taken as long as 2 minutes.

At this point, overtly apparent changes in Vista from release to release are relatively minimal. Microsoft is applying cosmetic polish and working on improving compatibility, stability, and performance. In particular, I'm finding networking capabilities in build 5536 behave much more like I'd expect—machines connected both by Ethernet and Wi-Fi are able to locate nearby machines and share files without hassles. Connecting to shared printers finally seems to work the way it should, too.


Windows Media Player 11, which seemed plagued by instability in the previous build I tested, has so far worked reliably. I'm happy to see that Vista's application-specific volume controls also seem to be shaping up.

Build 5536 includes a link to a Program Compatibility Wizard on the desktop. When Vista thinks an application didn't install successfully, it offers to retry the installation in a compatibility mode that lets you emulate earlier versions of Windows. Even after running the compatibility wizard, though, I wasn't able to successfully install one of the programming tools I rely on, ActiveState Perl.

The User Account Control feature that's a key aspect of Vista's security strategy seems like it's getting less intrusive—either that, or I'm getting more used to it. But in my conversations with Microsoft since Beta 2, the company has convincingly demonstrated how it uses the instrumentation built into Vista to determine which use cases most often generate dialogs and then work to mitigate those, so I'm not surprised that the experience is improving.

Evidence of Microsoft's continued efforts to fine-tune Vista's interface are also apparent in build 5536. The Flip 3-D view that shows you open applications in perspective when you press Windows-Tab has eliminated the jaggy edges that detracted from previous implementations.