Vista Explorer Shot

Another geeky post, but I love the feature of Vista that graphically represents space available on drives on your computer. In this shot I've just about exausted my USB 2.0 ports and hubs and am able to view in one place the amount of usage they all have. Have I a terrabyte of data yet? Maybe it's time to invest in one of these babies!

Three system snap

I was doing a remote meeting/presentation on Monday (after spending the entire night preparing!). The meeting was in Venray, Netherlands, I was in Oxford and another of my colleagues was in New York State. I took this snapshot when the guy in the States was presenting.

I was on a Vista laptop running a Win 2k VM image running a WebEx session over a VPN:

Vista -> Win2k (VM) -> XP (WebEx)

All that whilst attending the conference call on Skype.

Earlier I was logged on to a remote desktop remote controling another session. So that would be:

Vista -> Win2k (VM) -> Win Server 2k3 (RDP) -> Win Server 2k3 (RC)

All off one laptop. Now that's impressive!

"Dude, you're such a multi-machine wizard, dude!"

I'm such geek! :)

Let's Get Vista-ish!

Another one of those 'probably linked everywhere already' posts, but if want to get all Vista on yo' computer's rear-end without investing the hundreds of pounds/dollars/yen to buy the OS then C-Net.tv have a few tips help you go about it.

Judging by some poor people's reactions to Vista this may well be a wise choice.

Been taking a look at the requirements on the MS Vista site and I have to say they look extraordinarily optimistic. I have the advantage of coming from a MS support background so I guess I'm used to apply a factor of two to most official requirements from Microsoft. But 1GB RAM! Come on - no way!

Taking a look at the recommended requirements page made me since wince so hard I almost facially scarred myself. They are recommending 512Mb RAM for Home Basic Edition! This presumably is the new type of RAM made from pixie dust that releases loveliness into the ether whilst enabling us to run several VMware machines and play Half Life 2, Halo and Call of Duty 3 concurrently, repairs the ozone layer and negotiates a never-broken peace agreement in the Middle East?

OK, so take that last OTT statement. I could have used about half the amount of sarcasm, but I doubled it. My advice, do the same with the system recommendations and upgrade your hardware before you upgrade to Vista.

So why are the recommendations so low? Well, probably because Microsoft doesn't want to look like you have to buy a whole new computer before you upgrade. And when you do buy that new computer that it has to be twice the spec your old computer was when you bought it a year ago thinking it was pretty future proof.

To be fair to Microsoft this was pretty much to be expected. I've not seen the new OS yet but if it really is the next step in the evolution of the world's favourite OS then it's going to need a bit of extra power. I use Windows XP to pretty much it's maximum capacity at the moment and I have to say I can't wait for my upgrade (which is coming soon).

From what my brother says about his experiences I may feel differently when it gets here. So we'll see.

Beta News has one of the best articles I have seen on the system requirements. Also, one of the best lines: "It's just Vista, and it needs more processing power just to be Vista."