Being a Beta Tester of Vista could earn you benefits. Just like being able to be the first ones to have a copy of the new Vista RC1 (Release Candidate 1). Since Microsoft's release of the memory Hog Vista Beta 2 (the worst release to date), the software giant has been keen enough on hearing the community feedbacks. I myself had been able to use Vista Beta 2 and oh man it sucked! Being a little bit disgruntled on the upcomming OS, I haven't installed the later builds, but that was before the release of RC1. I am an avid fan of Paul Thurrot's winsupersite, and on one of his comments on the pre-RC1 release was very promissing. So I told myself to try RC1. And thats when I was shocked on the improvements that they had made. One of the most complained about thing in Vista is being a Memory Hog. I mean you must virtually have a minimum of 1gb worth of RAM. But upon installing RC1 on my friend's (Vernon) laptop we were shocked to see the performance improve. We estimated it to be somewhat of a 40%-50% improvement. It's just like using Windows XP. And with that, my expectations on Windows Vista has just gotten much higher. Upon using Vista, I have noticed major changes on the OS compared to XP (aside from the fact that it looks quite much cooler now). And I have made a simple list of what you may call "Cool Things" on the upcomming OS. Here it is (from 10-1):

	Save As Remember the old SaveAs dialog box? It has just been upgraded. It looks to be much more simplier. I really love the fact that they hide the Explorer part of the SaveAs dialog.
	Snipping Tool Have you ever wanted to capture a certain part of your screen? To do that, we must capture the whole screen (press printscreen) then paste it on MSPaint and cut-off the part that you want to capture. That's the old way. Now there's a tool to automate all of that. You could virtually select the area that you want to capture (by using your mouse) and it automatically generates the image.
	Windows Mail Its an upgrade to Outlook Express.
	Ink Ball An addition to the new games available in Vista.
	Chess The game that I have been waiting for. And its in 3d!
	Meeting Space Now this is an applicaiton that's gonna be useful in offices. This is an applicaiton that gives you the tools of having a virtual meeting. Its seems that this is the upgrade to NetMeeting.
	Network Projector Vista now enables you to connect to a nProjector attached to your network and project whatever you want to. So there's no unplugging for the Projector. Just attach it to a computer in your network then voila!
	Side Bar This is the most famous new feature here in my list. I was having second thoughts on placing it in here since many people already knew about this. But the hell, I really love this!
	Media Center This is the application that would definitely WOW you. It manages all of your multimedia files. You can then view you multimedia here. The UI is just superb. Although its quite slow on this release, I really must say that Microsoft has gotta fix this.
	Minesweeper it tops my list of favs since I am an addict when it comes to sweeping those mines. My best time in WinXP for this is (Expert Level) 73 sec. Now in Vista it has its needed facelift. But the game essence is still the same.

With this release from Microsoft comes hope that this OS would indeed make its time to be released this upcomming January. It holds our dreams of a very good  Operating System. And now I'm a believer.