MS developer: Vista is an incremental improvement

I came across this on Scoble's blog, a video he made a while ago of a visit to the team handling Vista's audio and video drivers.

While much of it is composed of talk on DRM (nothing new at all, apart from the team leader coming up with some hokey Web 2.0 piffle), if you skip to around 2/3rds of the way through they talk about the way multimedia is streamed in the new kernel. After the demo the team leader makes an interesting comment about Vista: it has a lot of incremental improvements made possible by the ground-up rewrite that add up to a lot in the end.

He says you can't put that on the box as a bullet-point, but TBH this is the only pro-Vista argument that gives me any desire to buy the OS when it comes out.

As a windows developer i've realised for some time now just how much _is new_ in Vista - the problem being that most of it's invisible to the end user. I think it's shaping up to be a MUCH better platform than XP that a lot of people will write off simply because it 'looks like windows' at the front end. I'm using CTP builds for a few days in a row, and each time i switch back to XP I start missing this and that - and _even stranger_ i'm finding XP pretty slow and clunky by comparison on the desktop of late..

Even Visual Studio 2005 feels QUICK on it. Now that's amazing.

If you're one of the many people basing your opinion of Vista on Beta 2 then PLEASE try RC1 when it's publically available - it's a world apart from what you've seen before.

I just hope they get nVidia to fix their drivers - the ones included with the 5536 release cause a BSOD for me in phase 3 of setup :(.

have you downloaded the latest ones from nVidia.com?

Well the machine is still finishing setup when it crashes. I tried booting into safe mode, but it then complains that setup can't continue in safe mode and quits. The BSOD reports nvlddmkm.sys, which is why i think it's the nvidia drivers.

If anyone knows how to fix this I've love to find out.

Personally I can't wait. I'm just not looking forward to the impact on my wallet :(