I'm an official beta tester for MS Vista, and I closely follow the public and closed betas for Office 2007. I really like what they are doing and it is surprisingly stable.

They locked the featureset back in April so they have 7 months for hardcore bug testing.

I've been running Beta 2 for a few weeks now and I've only had really 2 crashes and really its probably because my airflow in my box sucks so my hard drives explode or something :P.

I'm running with all the bells and whistles turned on and it works fairly well - not GREAT but alright. It definitely needs optimizations.

There ARE several issues right now. The major one in my opinion - DRIVERS! ATi's drivers suck right now. Also, running old code (meant for Windows 98 etc.) really taxes the system... CPU usage up to 100% for some reason - though the app will generally run fine.

In case anyone had doubts, Beta 2 is actually a rather slow build. The build that immediately followed it is noticibly faster...

I don't think anyone else here is using a Tablet PC, but if you are, huge improvements... like whoa.

And by the way, the actual date for Vista is NOVEMBER. The code is done. FINAL. Party, celebrate, woo.

It just won't be in a retail box on store shelves until January.



Oh and the Ribbon is freakin BRILLIANT.

And no I don't work for MS :P