[Scottish] Windows Vista Business value thingy

[ed]

Hi folks

So I went to this event, more as a break from an onerous project that I 
am as anything else.

Myself and other folks, including one, umm, 3levels above me, wondered 
why we were there as it was aimed at movers and shakers, not the grunts 
deaing with systems support, business analysis and customer expectation 
lowering, but there we were, ready to listen, ask and grab freebies.

Fred Macauley started off dire, with most of the laughs that he 
generated coming later when he was being less corporate, we got a spiel, 
some adulation of Chairman Bill and then big news about a complete 
localisation for Windows in Scots Gaelic.

I take this news to mean that MS is getting rattled by the take up of 
Open-source amongst small government bodies, given that OpenOffice has 
this and every month some

We then got a demo of Vista and Office 2007. I like the new ribbon 
actually,and some elements of the new way vista handles program menus 
looks OK, but most of what we were shown was flashy for flashy's sake or 
was suff we'd seen already in KDE or OSX, even the gut with the 7 year 
old PC running an older version of SuSE wasn't that impressed as to 
Vista's "novelty" or "innovation".

One things Vista will do is preload favourite apps for quicker load when 
you want them, don't know if that has any performance impact or how that 
works for non-MS apps.

The guys doing the demo were funny enough, one a bit like John Oliver 
with the younger guy his feed, but it didn't all work perfectly 
(particularly the collaboration/chat thing) and it was noticed that the 
13 minute complete install was from an image, rather than a disk.

The ase studies weren't too real, a IFA saying it was nice to some 
slides, and a film from Tesco saying they loved it, and the Q&A was 
short, only three questions and so I couldn't get my hardware impact 
questions answered, nor any patent impact ones. Sorry.


Lunch was OK, nice strawberry tarts but the catering at Dynamic Earth is 
known to be no bad, and they had a draw for a laptop and an XBox at the 
end.

Umm, I won a Dell 820D laptop. It claimed on the notce that it was top 
of the line, but the spec seemed fairly mid to low to me, aprt from the 
256MG Graphics card, which may be necessry given the flash in Vista.

Don't have my hands on it yet, they have to preload Vista and Office 
2007 on it, but I don't think the MS top man was too chuffed when I 
asked  if Lunix had all the drivers for the laptop's kit. So I may not 
get it after all, or get some dog that is barely running.

Anyway, that was essentially it

col