Weren't you in time to get your copy of Windows Vista beta 2? For Flemish speaking Belgians there is an alternative to get a copy of this software: PC Magazine België has included the Windows Vista beta 2 DVD with a product key. On top this, you'll also get a CD with "Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition (English)".

PC Magazine België, edition July/August 2006, includes a copy of Windows Vista Beta 2.

Tags: Microsoft Windows Windows Vista

Do you need to buy new hardware for running Windows Vista? As I'm not a subject matter expert on this, I'm going to stick with the details of my own experience with my 2 year old home desktop computer that is running Windows Vista beta 2 and Office 2007 beta 2.

It's an HP Workstation xw5000 machine with some good extentions, such as a Hercules graphics adaptor (ATI Radeon 9800XT) and a SATA hard disk. Although this machine is more than 2 years old, it runs Windows Vista beta 2 and Office 2007 beta 2 extremely smooth. Installation was a breeze and Windows Vista Aero was enabled by default. Here is a screenshot of Windows Vista's Performance Rating of this machine:

Windows Vista's performance rating of my HP Workstation xw500.

Just in case you want to know, we've put up a page that gives an overview of when a PC is Windows Vista Capable or Premium Ready. You can also have a look at the minimum system requirements for Windows Vista.

Tags: Microsoft Windows Windows Vista

A long time ago, I promised my great colleagues David and Arlindo to blog about my experiences as an end-user of Windows Vista and 2007 Office system (thus not as a developer). Due to high workload and some personal holidays I didn't blog anything about my Windows Vista User Experiences yet.

This will be my first post in a series about big and tiny enhancements that I found pretty cool while using those products. Let's start with a tiny but nice improvement...

Situation: As power user, you are listing your files with the file extensions displayed. When you're going to rename a file, Windows automatically selects the entire file name, including the extention. Because of this, it happens more than once that you change a file's extention unwillingly. Windows XP warns you that you're about the change the extention of the file.

Improvement in Windows Vista: When you want to rename a file, Windows Vista will only select the name part of the file name but not the file extention. When you start typing, you'll only change the name but never the extention.

When renaming a file name in Windows Vista, the OS automatically selects only the name of the file.

Tags: Microsoft Windows Windows Vista