I am headed to Build later this month and am excited by both the Surface tablet and what the PC makers are going to show us in Windows 8 devices. But ahead of that show there have been a lot of reveals by the likes of HP, Dell, Lenovo and ASUS.

Nearly a week ago I installed Windows 8 as my main laptop operating system. I could finally do this once the Windows Phone 7.1.1 SDK update was released (making the Windows Phone emulator work on Windows 8). So I am not knee deep into Windows 8 as a desktop operating system.

I am copying a video file across my wireless network (though this particular machine is kinda flaky, so it might not be Vista's fault) but I thought this was funny:

This blog post may seem to be a clever way of increasing my web traffic but the fact is that I am growing frustrated with the adoption of Vista and Microsoft's general under-delivering on Vista.

Url: http://news.com.com/Vista%20draining%20laptop%2...

Url: http://hotspot.t-mobile.com/vista

I was setting up my new laptop with Vista today and it looks like everything is finally installed, except my fonts.  So I opened the Font folder and picked, "Add New Font".  This is what I saw:

Url: http://wilderminds.blob.core.windows.net/downloads/wpfesample.gadget

Url: http://weblogs.asp.net/kennykerr/archive/2007/0...

Url: http://jameskyton.wordpress.com/2006/12/29/beyo...

I thought I'd mention a problem I had with my new Vista installation. 

Interestingly Windows Media Player 11's visualizations in Vista don't seem to be Video Hardware accellerated.  While I understand that Windows Media Player 11 needs to be backwards compatible, it does make the visualizations looks ugly compared with the rest of the OS.  Hopefully they'll change that for Vista RTM, but for now that are just plain ugly (and CPU hogs).

I really like the realtime (or near real-time) preview of the windows on the Taskbar in Vista.  Check it out:

Url: http://www.tweakvista.com/Article38996.aspx

Url: http://microsoft.com/vista

Url: http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/wga.asp

Url: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?page_id=3170

I spent the majority of yesterday moving my primary laptop to Vista.  I got a new 100G/7200RPM drive, so I decided to chew up some of the space with a dual boot.  I got to late last night (about 6am) when I decided it was a dead proposition and I needed to revert to my XP SP2 desktop.  Good news is that a majority of the software I loaded on Vista worked without a hitch.  At the end of the day it came to that a few critical pieces of software weren't Vista-ready.

Url: http://news.com.com/Vista+beta+sucks+up+battery...

Url: http://microsoft.com/vista

Url: http://www.bbspot.com/News/2006/03/windows-vist...

As some of you know I lost the screen on my main laptop (HP ZD8000, a lovely machine at 13 lbs) so I sent it into support where they are going to fix it but take 2 weeks to do it. I took over my old laptop from my dear Tricia to try and make it work for a while.

Url: http://news.com.com/Longhorns+new+name+Windows+...

Url: http://weblogs.asp.net/mdavey/archive/0001/01/0...

Url: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7613523/site/newsweek/

Url: http://microsoft.com/mediacenter

Url: http://www.microsoftmonitor.com/archives/007717...

Url: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=...

I've had the WinHEC build of Longhorn for a while now and I have to say I am very pleasantly surprised.  It seems that Longhorn is really coming along.  I am very focused on WinFS programming, so I have not had too much time to dig into other interesting topics like Avalon (though Chris Sells loves the data binding) and Indigo.

Url: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/34737.html

After attending most of the Keynote this morning at the PDC I am convinced that Microsoft is headed in the right direction, but it is still a long way off. 2005 or 2006 is too long to plan towards. On other note, Yukon and Whidbey will be here soon. Its about time to start planning for these technologies now.

Url: http://news.com.com/2100-1002_3-5085251.html?ta...

Bad news to all you AMD fans (yours truly included), Microsoft has announced that the upcoming Windows 2003, 64 bit edition will *not* have support for Opteron's 64 bit mode!