For the last 3 or 4 days I have been playing heavily with the PDC bits. The one technology that I have installed on a couple of my computers is Windows Vista.

I have a Pentium 4 3.4 ghz desktop with a 2 160 gig drives setup as a raid array. I had no problems installing beta 1 of Longhorn. (Well a little,. I realized that I needed to create a floppy for the drivers of raid controller). Hmm….I soon realized that many of the features that were shown at the PDC were not on this build. So I looked into “The Goods” (6 DVDS) that were given to everyone at PDC and found an ISO image for PDC build of Windows Vista.

Cool! I created a new DVD from the ISO image and started installing it. Damn it! For some reason the Raid drivers don’t work. I even tried getting the raid drivers from the Intel site. Nope, it rejected those drivers also. After screaming at the display a few times and cursing at Microsoft, I gave up! For the night that is. It was 2 am and time to get some sleep.

In the morning,I ended up installing an old 60 gig ATA drive that I had in my box of old computer equipment. After getting all the boot sequences right and setting up the master and slave configuration with the dvd drive, I was able to get it installed.

I have a REALLY good graphics card with over 256 megs of RAM on it and the OS took advantage of the power big time. I noticed a huge performance over Windows XP when it came to rendering windows.

The other cool feature is that when you hover over the program on the task bar, you get a thumbnail of the actual application. To take it even further, its rendering real time of what the applciation is doing. So if you’re watching a video with Media Player, you will see the video playing in the thumbnail! Thumbnails have replaced the boring old tool tip! Very cool. What’s more impressive for Windows though is that its running pretty damn smooth. By pushing most of the work to the GPU, your CPU can take care of the more important tasks.

I have also installed the new WinFX SDK to the machine and am starting to play around with this new technlogy. The technology I find the most impresive is Avalon (WPF) It’s like taking Flash and putting it on steriods. I took a brief look at this in 2003 but decided to leave it alone because it was still too far away to get too involved with it. Now that were about 1 to 1.5 years away and its matured alot since then, I plan on giving it a serious look. The other positive value of this technology is that it will work on Windows XP. There is no way that Windows Vista will be on every desktop in the next 3 to 5 years. To be able to support it on Windows XP will allow people to adopt it much quicker knowing it will have a broader audience. These are good times again. Like one of the speakers said at PDC; “Programming is fun again!!”