Microsoft’s parting gift to all those attending WinHEC this week was a set of DVDs with the Longhorn Server and Windows Vista Beta 2 software. The code should be available for the public to download within the next few weeks.

VMWare’s free (beta) virtualization software provided a safe testing environment, so it didn’t take long before a Vista virtual machine was made on my home computer and the x64 Vista beta disk was spinning around. Time to catch up on lost sleep and the next morning everything was done.

27 May 2006

Similarly, downloading and installing the public beta of Office 2007 was a piece of cake.

Between the two applicaitons there are many new features and items that take some getting used to, but so far I’ve been able to at least locate everything.

The only serious issue is the inability to get the Aero graphical look to show up. To get semi transparent windows, you need an advanced graphics card and plenty of memory (1Gb). The system doesn’t recognize my card, even after downloading the special Vista 2 driver from the manufacturer’s website.

Word’s blogging feature furthermore turned out  to be a disappointment, but for reasons outside of Microsoft’s control. The typepad blogging service that runs this blog doesn’t support FTP uploads. Posting text is no problem, but adding pictures is impossible. Boo! for Typepad.

Adding a link on the other hand is gem, since Word will display a list of recently visited websites to link to – although I doubt that that feature will support Firefox.

Tags: office 2007, windows  vista, Microsoft, blogging, typepad, beta, winhec2006, winhec