Windows Vista: Locked and loaded!

It’s 4:10am in the morning, Bella came through to our bedroom in the middle of the night so I thought that I would take the opportunity after Nicola put her back in her room to come and check where my Windows Vista installation was at. The machine had gone to sleep, but when I woke it up it was ready at the final configuration steps where I set up where I am and create the default user account. I’m not getting Aero on this machine which will probably prompt me to ask for an upgraded laptop sooner rather than later (in fact, it already has).

There are a few things that aren’t working at the moment (like audio), but I already know what my first two Vista visions are going to be. Caio!

Windows Vista: My journey begins . . .

The rest of the world started installing Windows Vista BETA 2 earlier this week, but I had to hold off until today so that I could get my MSDN web-cast out of the way. I did that at about 7am this morning and now I have just over a week before I need to use my laptop for demonstrations. Right now I am backing up my “sandbox” directory which is where I put any source files I am working on, this is really just a precaution because most of the stuff that I really want to keep is either safely tucked away in SharePoint or Team Foundation Server.

I’ll be installing Vista on a Dell Inspiron 6000 with two gigabytes of RAM, and while it has a 128MB video card I believe it uses shared memory, so glass isn’t supported. On top of Vista I’ll be installing Office 12 BETA 2, although I’ve been running Office 12 BETA 2 on Windows XP for over two weeks now and I’ve been very impressed with its stability so far and I’m really starting to like the usability enhancements (the ribbon bar is a huge leap forward).

Dogfooding the latest Microsoft operating system is something that I’ve been doing ever since Windows NT 3.5 and Windows 95. I’ve been keenly interested in Darren’s (and his home blog), Rocky’s and Grant’s first impressions to see if there were any gotchas that I needed to watch out for, but mostly I’ve just been lusting over the UI that their laptops are spitting up.

My next blog post to you will be coming from within Windows Vista!

P.S. This has been a long road to get to this point, I first remember trying out Vista in 2003 after the Professional Developers Conference where they released a very early build of Longhorn.