Microsoft officials obviously believe Windows Vista is ready, given that it is set to release it to manufacturing within weeks, if not days. But what do some of its toughest testers think?

With millions kicking Windows Vista’s tires, just about anyone and everyone is a Vista tester these days. But there is a group – more of the crème-de-la-crème – who’ve been getting access to regular, sometimes weekly, builds and giving Microsoft constant Vista feedback throughout the development process. Many of these testers are Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs), authors of Vista books and operators of blogs and Web sites that dissect (and sometimes skewer) Vista on a regular basis.

Typically, they’re not the easiest crowd to please. And while most agree that Microsoft has come an incredibly long way since Vista Beta 2 and Release Candidate (RC) 1, they also are not 100-percent convinced the Vista rollout will be a smooth one.

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News source: All About Microsoft

Windows XP Service Pack (SP 3), which Microsoft officials said in January to expect in the latter half of 2007, now has slipped into 2008.

Microsoft delivered the last service pack update for XP, Windows XP SP2 (which was actually more of a whole new version of Windows than it was a typical service pack) in August of 2004.

And that’s not all that’s slipping: Windows Server 2003 SP 2, until recently due out in the second half of 2006, is now slated for Q1 2007. Microsoft released SP1 for Windows Server 2003 in March, 2005.

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News source: All About Microsoft

If you didn’t already download the Windows Vista Release Candidate (RC) 2 bits, you missed your window of opportunity.

Microsoft posted the RC2 bits for download on October 6 and made them available to technical beta testers and others who had enrolled previously in the Customer Preview Program beta pool. Once Microsoft passed its internal target of having 200,000 testers download the new build, Microsoft closed off access to the RC2 build, No. 5744.

“We hit our download target (200K+) within 72 hours of propping the files!” said Vista Program Manager Nick White in a posting on the Vista Team Blog.

Microsoft officials have said RC2 will be the last broadscale test release of Vista. The next time the masses will have access to the code is in November 2006 (for business customers) and January 2007 (for others obtaining the product through other retail/delivery channels).

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News source: All About Microsoft

Microsoft will end support for Windows XP Service Pack 1 and SP1a on Tuesday, leaving people no option but to upgrade to Service Pack 2 if they wish to continue to receive crucial components, including security software.

There’s little reason for anyone to still be running SP1; SP2 contained a range of improvements to XP’s security. People can check which version they are running by right-clicking on the My Computer desktop icon and then selecting properties.

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News source: News.com