And just like that, we can suddenly see the light at the end of the tunnel. All of our hopes, all of our worries, all of whatever feelings we may have for Windows Vista are hanging on the edge of a precipice. Will they ship it on time? Will they ever ship it? Does it even matter?

Increasingly, the actual ship date for Windows Vista does not matter, but not for the reasons you may suspect. Microsoft will ship Windows Vista exactly when they want to, according to the schedule they previously laid out. They're not delaying it any further, and after releasing the product to manufacturing in late October 2006, businesses can expect to get it via volume licensing in November, followed by consumers and general availability in late January 2007.

Before any of that can happen, however, we have a final milestone to cross. It's called Release Candidate 1 (RC1) and I expect to be writing a lengthy review of that build--currently slated as build 5552, though of course these things change regularly on an ongoing basis--sometime in about two weeks. For now, however, we have the next best thing, a pre-RC1 interim build, 5536, that offers a peak at many of the best changes Microsoft has made to Windows Vista since the lackluster Beta 2 build.