Amano on Vista

Yesterday, for the third time, I went to a Microsoft tech talk. As usual, one of the talks was about the upcoming Windows Vista (the next Windows OS) and the prowess of the WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation). They also gave out Vista RC1 installers. At the moment, Vista is on RC2 (Release Candidate 2). For those who don't want to be bothered by what a Release Candidate means, it's basically a version of a software, in Microsoft terms, that is viable for release. It means it's almost as good as the final release, but not quite. If you ask me, it still should be called a BETA version. Whether this RC term was invented by software developers or by marketers, I don't know. I don't really care.

That night, I contemplated whether I should install the Vista RC, or just let it gather dust again (as the Beta installer did, obtained from a previous tech talk). It's gonna expire on June 2007 anyway, and the final Vista release isn't that far away. But all these tech talk events got the best of me, and decided to install the thing on a separate partition, so I can still boot the old Windows XP. I have a 100Gig hardrive after all O-O

I took a good look at Amano. (Oh yeah, in case you haven't been reading, I named the laptop Amano, after the Japanese artist Yoshitaka Amano).


Hmm, he could use a good OS revamp. (That white glare from the monitor... is my good AURA reflecting).

I bought some stuff to munch on, in case something bad happens during the install.


Yeah, that Snickers bar was over before you can say Snickers.

Here's the installer. Any good ol' geek would be proud enough to post a picture such as this...


...well not all actually, just the worse ones lol!

After 10 years, the thing finally installed on a 15Gig partition. Bless Bill Gates.


How serene. Haha! Installed without a hitch. It's running quite nicely too! Here are some snapshots.




Those small thingies on the right hand side of the desktop are called "Gadgets". Obviously a rip off of Mac OSX's "Widgets". In there currently is an analog clock, a picture slideshow, and a notes stick on similar to post-its. I like it!!! Of course these pictures don't do justice to what Vista can actually do, so just click here if you want to learn more.

Tonight I might start learning how to create those gadgets. And next week probably start programming in WPF. Ok I'm not doing this out of pure personal pleasure if any of you are shaking your heads in pity :P Mediacorp (Singapore's somewhat sole media giant) is actually interested in this (WPF) and gadgets, and a colleague has actually went to training with some Mediacorp people on this technology. So might as well grab this opportunity and hopefully catch some attention. We are an IT arm of Mediacorp after all.

So where do all of these lead to? Mediacorp notices, we start some projects, the developer in 1-Net becomes famous, developer sends some demo songs to Mediacorp people, developer gets backing, someone in the music industry FINALLY notices, band becomes rockstars.

That's the bottomline of it all. Really. BwahahAHAH! Rock on!!

(That's the way to end a geeky blogpost)

(Tags: Acer Aspire 5562 Vista 5600 RC1 Bluetooth Widcomm 2500)