Windows Vista to ship next August?

Windows Vista 1 Minute

Business Week claims to have found a leaked internal blog post from Chris Jones of Microsoft’s Windows team with detail on the Windows Vista release schedule:

[T]he company has been mum on the date, saying only that Vista will launch some time in the second half of 2006. Analysts have taken that to mean a shipment date some time near Christmas.

It turns out, the company plans to ship much sooner. According to an internal blog by Chris Jones, one of Microsoft’s top Windows execs, the shipping target is Aug. 31. To be clear, that’s not the day Vista will land on store shelves or be available on computers. Rather, that’s the target to have software code complete and sent off to computer manufacturers. That way, they can test the software and start to build PCs in time for the holiday season.

[…]

If Microsoft keeps Jones’s schedule, Vista could be available in October. The code for Windows XP, Vista’s predecessor, was complete on Aug. 24, 2001, and launched on Oct. 25 that same year.

For those who are trying to match the Windows Vista and Windows XP schedules and wailing about the lateness of Windows Vista Beta 2, it’s worth noting that Windows XP Beta 1 appeared in October 2000 and Windows XP Beta 2 was released on March 27, 2001. Windows Vista Beta 1 appeared in July 2005, which puts it well ahead of XP’s schedule.

That August date is not a fantasy at all.

(Via LonghornBlogs)

Published by Ed Bott

Tech journalist. Author of 25+ books. ZDNET Contributing Editor since 2006. Contact info: https://edbott.com/contact-me/

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4 thoughts on “Windows Vista to ship next August?”

  1. Ed, how does Vista compare to XP so far “under the hood?” Is the file system different, or does it still use NTFS? How well does it manage memory? Does it manage memory better than XP (i.e. more RAM operations, less I/O operations)? Has it improved on tools such as chkdsk and Disk Defragmenter? In short, is it faster? More stable? Easier to maintain or optimize? TIA.

  2. Pingback: Windows Vista Info

  3. Ken, the betas I’ve been working with aren’t really suitable for even rough benchmarking. They all use NTFS, as will the final product, and there is one major memory management feature still to be incorporated, but the rest of those excellent questions will have to wait a few more months for answers.

  4. Thanks. I was an Windows XP public beta tester, but I’m sitting this one out so far. I’ll ask again in a few months. 🙂

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