Alright let me start off saying one thing: RC2 is almost the same damned thing as RC1, just slightly more responsive.
My guess is that M$ just fixed alot of little things that crashed the OS or programs. It took me 30 minutes from booting to the DVD to first glance at the desktop. It took 8.5 minutes to expand the files off the DVD on the HDD. The setup is the exact same, same unattended setup until the configuration screen on first boot. The configuration is the same, except I don't remember having to specify that I was connecting to a home network twice, which I did this time through. All in all Vista installed all my hardware correctly except for onboard audio and X-Fi and mouse and keyboard, but all of that was expected due to a lack of drivers. There are Vista specific drivers for Realtek HD Audio, and the Vista X-Fi drivers are build specific and I really didn't want to deal with the hassle of trying them again, given the small time frame I am working on.
As for overall performance, the Vista system assessment took about 3 minutes and was done before I logged in the first time. The system became partially unresponsive (sort of expected during a performance analysis). The system analyzer spit back the same performance numbers as I got under RC1, and are as follows:
CPU (AMD 3800+ @ 2.7GHz): 4.4
RAM (Mushkin 3-3-2-8 @ DDR490, 2x1GB): 5.3
Geforce 7900GTX (Included drivers, more on that later): 5.9
Gaming Graphics: 5.9
Hard Drive (Freshly formatted Diamond Max 10 300GB): 5.3
I had to leave my other 2 hard drives unplugged during installation in order to facilitate unattended installation, so I decided to try something: plug in the 2 SATA drives with Windows booted, just to see how it handles it compared to XP.
The result: Vista did not initially recognize them, so I went into device manager and hit search for hardware changes and Vista picked them up perfectly. Contrary to XP, Vista did not stall or lag or freeze momentarily when the hard drives were attached. Take it as you well, but just a FYI lol.
I tested my OCZ Rally 1GB USB flash drive and again it wasn't ReadyBoost qualified (no surprise there). Again the folder view options are hidden under in windows explorer under Organize... I still don't understand why, but hey its still the same as RC1 (didn't expect a change).
On load, which was definitely smoother than XP boot, I idled at 4-5% CPU and 31% RAM which equates to 635MB of RAM consumed just for Vista to sit around... which is on par with, possibly 1-2% less, RC1. I have AeroGlass and every other feature possible activated. So worst case scenario you can expect Vista to consume 600-650MB RAM with all features enabled.
Oh, I did download nVidia's RC1 specific graphics driver, just to see how it interacted with RC2, and it wasn't very nice. It disabled Aero Glass. I never installed it when I ran RC1, so I can't tell whether it was just due to the driver, or whether the driver really did hate RC2. So I tested the roll back driver feature, and it worked beautifully no restart necessary.
I still don't like where M$ buried the audio configuration. It is not that they buried it, but its in a strange place. You have to click on your speakers and then click configure. To me that's kind of strange, although I see their logic. I am just not used to configuring speakers inside an OS, I usually do it with the Creative installation process. I haven't had a chance to test the optical out feature, so I don't yet know if somehow we can get surround sound through optical out instead of PCM stereo sound we get under XP. I will get there at some point tonight.
Whether you care about any of this is none of my business, these are just the things I have run into in my 45 min on RC2. Like I said I am not a qualified reviewer, and I will be delving deeper into RC2 once I get the time, but I am writing an accounting test at the moment so I took a break to write this skin and bones review.
On to gaming performance. The only game I have time to really test is Lineage II because I have the install on my hard drive and I don't have to go through 20 different updates and 4 CD's like BF2 ( I don't have alot of games, too cheap lol). Well the actual performance is much better. The same place I logged off last time right outside near Devastated Castle (for those of you who may play). It was lagging horribly, I was constantly skipping frames, having issues switching between game logs (I overlay 3 different characters and play them all at the same time on the same computer) it was just a wreck. This time when I logged in, it was much smoother. The load was faster, there was no white screen (when the window became unresponsive Vista turned it white), and overall game play was very good. There was the occasional lag step but that happens. When I get time I will put BF2 through the paces, but again, without X-FI I can't know exactly how well it will perform because the onboard audio will be sucking up CPU cycles, but such is life.
There it is, my first impressions in a very very fast review.
In conclusion, RC2 = RC1 + performance boost.
Edit: I forgot my complaints against Windows Explorer. They are the same as RC1, but why on earth do all of my folders open with the stupid tiling of folder icons? That is just damned annoying, I mean really annoying. When I switch to details view (the preferred view for me) I get rating, tags, date taken, for a folder full of downloads (apps, folders mainly). That doesn't make alot of sense to me. The only useful thing that comes up already as a column is size. So every time I have to go delete unnecessary columns and add useful ones that I like (date created, type). On the bright side, there is an endless choice for column headers.
Edit: used Firefox RC2 to spell check this bad boy, sorry for the misspelled words.
thanks for 3 stars, I'd like to see you do better with under 30 min of usage time to compare
Install was uneventful. GL 
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