As Windows Vista is released to manufacturing (RTM) today — a significant milestone for Microsoft and its partners — anticipation is building around that all-important question: How good is it really?

Microsoft says Windows Vista is its most heavily tested operating system ever, with deep investments made to ensure greater security, reliability and usability.

Sven Hallauer, Release Manager, Director of Program Management says "We didn’t just fix the bugs, we took a new look at the classic places where customers have had the most pain. For example, we have a much more robust feedback mechanism built into Windows Vista to detect application crashes and hangs. We made a special effort to fix those issues, both through bug fixing and architectural changes in Windows Vista."

Windows Vista sports a new memory management feature called SuperFetch which allows the operating system to learn and tailor itself to the users needs. Before Windows Vista, computers allocated memory by reacting to requests — when the user ran an application, the operating system pulled the data into memory from a hard disk. With SuperFetch, the memory manager is proactive. SuperFetch discovers usage patterns and prepares commonly used data before the user needs it. For example, if a user logs in around 9 a.m. every morning and runs Microsoft Outlook, SuperFetch learns this and proactively ensures that Microsoft Outlook is ready in memory a few minutes before 9 a.m.

Windows Vista is the first Microsoft operating system to be designed under the Secure Development Lifecycle (SDL), which is Microsoft’s process for building more secure software. Features such as Internet Explorer Protected Mode, User Account Control and Windows Defender, help people better protect themselves and their PCs by default.

However, Windows Vista’s journey is not yet done. PC makers, device manufacturers and software developers can finalize work on their products and applications to ensure great customer experiences when Windows Vista becomes available -- to Microsoft's volume license customers this month and consumers on January 30, 2007.