SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 1 — Microsoft rushed what may be the final test version of its Windows Vista operating system to more than a million testers on Friday, trying to meet deadlines for its long-delayed commercial release.

With pressure mounting to squeeze out final bugs, Microsoft asked testers to give Vista an urgent shakedown — even as they headed into a long holiday weekend.

Microsoft has said publicly that it is hoping to offer the program to corporate customers before the end of November and to the broader consumer market in January.

It will be the first new version of Windows in more than five years, an unusually long time between releases. But Microsoft executives have also repeatedly cautioned that until Vista meets performance and stability standards, the company will refrain from offering it commercially.

On Friday, several analysts said that the Microsoft program might end up slipping further from the November goal. Microsoft has recently been talking about an “end of the year” shipping goal for the corporate version of Vista, according to one analyst who was briefed on Thursday.

A company spokesman disputed the reports of further slippage, saying that the company was still aiming to meet the November and January goals.

Because most large corporations may wait as long as 18 months before deploying the program widely to employees, a relatively short further delay is unlikely to have a significant revenue impact on Microsoft.

“Corporate adoption will be relatively slow,” said Roger L. Kay, president of Endpoint Technologies Associates, a computer industry consulting firm. “It could be 2008 before many companies actually deploy in volume.”

Over the summer, Vista has been tested by several million developers and ordinary users and has received less than stellar marks. Complaints have ranged from repeated crashes to an irritating user interface that constantly force users to click on warning boxes.

A recent version being used by a smaller group of technical experts has been given much higher marks for stability and for using less computer memory.

Friday’s version, called Release Candidate 1, or RC1, is a crucial last trial needed to tell the company whether it is on track.

“This is supercritical for us,” said Sven Hallauer, director of release management for Windows Vista, during an internal interview that was posted Friday on a company Web site. “We have our own criteria for quality to ship, but we really need the validation from the community.”

Time is particularly tight, he said, because the company has only two or three weeks after Friday’s release to make significant changes, after which the project will grow increasingly constrained.

“Teams are working superhard right now,” he said in the interview. “Teams are working 50, 60, 70 hours a week to go ship this RC1 milestone.”

In an e-mail message sent to testers Friday, Jim Allchin, co-president of Microsoft’s platform and services division, wrote: “The operating system is in great shape with RC1, but there’s still a lot of testing to do. You’ve come through for us so far, and I’m asking you to once again put the pedal to the metal and send us feedback.”

Analysts said that while the company has made progress, there could still be land mines that could throw the effort into disarray.

“They are never out of the woods until the product is delivered,” said Al Gillen, research director for system software at the International Data Corporation, a market research firm based in Framingham, Mass.

This week, Microsoft declined to comment after pricing information appeared on Amazon.com. The prices, which ranged from $199 for a basic home version to $399 for the all-in-one Windows Vista Ultimate, will potentially increase Microsoft’s earnings next year, according to Rick Sherlund, a Goldman Sachs financial analyst.

In a research note, he also cautioned that the significant hardware requirements for the new operating system might limit the rate of adoption for the software.

Vista will have an array of new features and changes in appearance from Microsoft’s current operating system, Windows XP. Superfetch, for example, lets Vista monitor the applications most frequently used and places them in memory so that they will appear to load more quickly.

In the interview posted by Microsoft, Mr. Hallauer said Vista would have fewer dreaded “blue screens of death,” in which the operating system freezes and leaves the user with a blue display screen. Instead, Vista will automatically recover from such freezes and start over, without forcing the user to restart the system manually.

这是一篇Technology 类的新闻。。。看看吧。。。
慢慢的接触国外的东西。。。

单词的意思大概都明白，但是整体就不是太理解了，看来我的英语水平还是很低的啊

还是有很多单词不认识啊。

我这段时间也开始在纽约时报看新闻了
个人觉得不习惯 没有以前在chinadaily看的顺