hi guys,

sorry i havnt been on in ages - new job is pretty cool but long hours lol

they sent to oxfordshire on thursday for a vista and office training day, i should think that most of it you guys know already, but i was genuinly impressed, things like bitlocker,windows defender 07 to name a few are similar to products or software already out there and being used. windows ready boost had to be one of greatest improvements in vista, it allows you to insert a usb mass storage device (or any other flash memory device) and then use it as virtual memory, i.e if you had a 2gb flash drive, you could either use the 2048mb as virtual memory or partion it so x amount of mb's is for storage the rest is virtual ram.

using xbox 360's with a fairly powerful vista computer (in this case a hp pavillion 3.6ghz 2048mb ram) you can stream 3 films at a time, films are stored on the pavilion but played on the xbox - wirelessly, you can even do it with the same film, with vista your animal of a desktop pc becomes your home server, to the extent of running your home.

one of the laptops they had vista running on was a top of the range hp, we have a few of these at work, and with xp there boot-up times are dreadful compared to my acer which has half the ram, however same spec hp laptop with vista is like a different animal completely, boots much faster and handles the demanding graphics well, while in windows aero the cpu peaked at 4% usage, it was a dual-core but that is still impressive, even when we were streaming 3 films it peaked at 14%, this obviously shows an awful lot of potentual for vista.

there are currently four sku's for vista, these are; home, home premium, business and ultimate. most retailers will only stock home and home premium.

despite all the hype and speculation, vista cannot be brought off the shelf in 64bit, only the 32bit version will be available through retailers, however microsoft will be happy to send you a 64bit vista disk free of charge providing that you cover postage and packaging costs.

i have tried to add some screenshots of vista, still have some to upload,

darren