Windows Vista RTM released to MSDN Subscriptions!
Woot! I've been waiting for many a year to move my work station OS beyond WinXP and the day is finally here. I logged into MSDN to check if it might have been released a little earlier than the announced date of tomorrow and saw it was available. So I started downloading it immediately but I still have a loooong ways to go. I also did a quick scan of fellow Telligenti blogs in my reader and saw that Ken found it on MSDN after lunch and already finished downloading it. He was lucky to get in before the crowds and massive traffic hit!
I have avoided all the Vista beta and RC releases, so this will be my first first-hand experience with Vista. Using beta versions of dev environments and office suites is fine by me, but I was a little leery of using a beta OS on one of the machines I depend on. I would have tried Vista RC2 but by that point I heard RTM would be out shortly so figured it wasn't worth going through the reformatting and reinstalling back to back.
So this will be a fun weekend - assuming my Vista download completes by the end of it of course. First up this weekend is repaving my laptop with the new Vista Ultimate, Office 2007, and .NET 3.0 RTM bits. Yum!
Unfortunately I've keep seeing various software and devices that say they are waiting until home consumer versions of Vista hit store shelves in January before supporting Vista. This doesn't make any sense to me as thousands of developers will be running Vista before then and will no doubt be passing on devices that don't support Vista this holiday season.
The highest profile case I've heard of is Zune, which sucks because I was strongly considering buying one this month until I heard about the current Vista incompatibility. I've made do for a long time with one of the original Diamond Rio 500 mp3 players and a Windows Smartphone that can play mp3s. But I want to finally get a really nice hard drive based audio and video player this holiday for my wife and I to use. I have no interest in iPods because of their refusal to provide a subscription service and I have never bought any iTunes songs. "Buying" DRM songs doesn't appeal to me at all. My opinion is if I have to use DRM ridden music files, then I'd much rather get them via monthly subscriptions where it doesn't matter if I lose them or want to change formats/devices. If I do end up getting a player that's locked into a single store and DRM system it will be a Zune since it has better features, upgradeable firmware, and future XBox Live integration. The PlaysForSure media players also interest me since they usually support more audio/video types and have a greater choice in compatible music services.
Only 2,300 MB of Vista remaining...
