WinHec 2006
That’s right 
Today’s the last day of WinHEC 2006. It’s amazing how time flies when you’re having fun. Since I was sick yesterday and didn’t go out anywhere until last night (the Attendee’s Party at GameWorks– which I left early to catch the season finale of Lost), I wasn’t able to get my hands on the Beta 2 discs until this morning. I just finished installing Vista Beta 2 on my Dell Latitude X1 and I must say that I’m very impressed. It is very stable compared to previous builds and so far I haven’t run into any problems of it being slow (using a 1.1GHz processor with 1.24GB of RAM). Unfortunately because this system has built-in graphics, I don’t get the cool Aero experience, but other than that, Beta 2 shapes up nicely.
As for pictures, well the airline lost my luggage when I flew in Monday, which had my power adapter for the camera, and now the battery is dead, so until I get my luggage back, if I ever do, I won’t be posting any pictures. I did, however, transfer some pictures over to my system Tuesday of the keynote, but unfortunately those turned out too blurry.
As for Office 2007 Beta 2, all I can say is wow. I think Office 2007 will definitely be very popular, especially among businesses. I get calls all the time asking me how to do simple stuff in Word or Excel, and the biggest problem is people don’t won’t to look through all of those submenus, and now hey don’t have too. Thumbs up to Microsoft for Office 2007.
Well it’s time for a few sessions before I need start packing. I’m going to be attending ‘HD DVD and Windows Vista…’ session this morning.
So my schedule for today and the expo schedule didn’t line up, so I missed the chance to go back onto the expo floor and snap some pictures of the Windows Live phones and such. I’ll try and find a friendly website who has a rep here who will pass of a few images to us, but the main hardware portion of the event is over. All that is left over today and tomorrow is many conferences and some hands-on labs.
Update: We may have a guy who has some images. We just have to find the lost Neowin staff member. If anybody sees a tall skinny guy from the eastern United States who has a southern accent and answers to the screen name Hurmoth, tell him to get ahold of us.
All I can say is that it’s about darn time.
Included in this pack are:
Vista x64
Vista x86
Longhorn Server x64
Longhorn Server x32
Vista Software Development Kit
So tonight it looks like everybody here at the event will be quite busy, and many install discs being run.
OK so I didn’t win but I came 3rd (like last year!!). I won an AMD 4800+ processor 
Coming to WinHEC I did not think that it would involve me entering a game tournament and getting to the very final game. Heck, I didn’t even know they had such tournaments at a business-like event. None the less, I did get to the finals but was snubbed in the end by some very smart players. One of our own walked away with a nice prize, but I’ll leave that to him to announce.
I have been posting all of my WinHEC photos on my Flickr acccount, and they are there for your enjoyment if you want to view them. I will be walking through the expo floor today and taking pictures of some new hardware, such as the new tablet-like Origami devices and those Windows Live phones. Until then, I leave you with a photo of the expo floor.
Well after a morning of installing Windows Vista Beta 2 (build 5384.4) I can safely say that I am impressed by the end result. I am running it on a IBM Thinkpad T40p, which has a built in ATi Mobilty Radeon 9000 videocard that does not support the Aero Glass mode. On first boot I found that 2 devices were not installed, my wireless controller and the Thinkpad PM Device (whatever that is?) they were both marked as unknown devices but after selecting ‘Update drivers’ and ‘Search online for drivers’ they were both installed meaning I have a completely installed system on Vista Beta 2.
I have not seen any significant lag on my 1.6GHz Intel M with 1 GB of Ram even though I have a Windows System Performance Rating of just 1! I am getting the UAP popups everynow and then but it seems to me that Microsoft has further improved this by only getting prompted for system critical issues. It doesn’t feel like an annoyance yet so I will wait before I go and disable it.
Hopefully the dinner with Jim Allchin last night will mean that our concerns for non-glass capable machines (like this one) might get a better theme than the one that shipped with Beta 2. It plain sucks and I told him last night when I was there, he seemed to take it on-board and wrote reminder notes for himself on this very subject.
At the moment Tom Warren is at the Gaming Zone competing on AMD Gamer PC’s with Halflife 2 Deathmatch. If he wins he’ll get one of the machines the competition is being held on, there are prizes for second and third place and I think he’ll do well enough to fill one of those spots.
I am going to fiddle a bt more with this build and wait for neowin.net to come back up with the new Shift design 
Last night Steve and I met with Jim Allchin. It was a surreal meeting and from the original invite I thought it was going to be a party with a lot more people. There were 10 of us including Jim I believe.
Jim is a very knowledgable and genuine guy. We sat down at a table in a seafood restaurant and Jim asked us about on10.net. I’d personally never come across this site and I’ve had a look today and can see why people were a little negative about it. Jim essentially wanted to know what needed to be changed and why.
Eventually we got around to talking about Vista and its problems and I think a lot of people missed the point that Microsoft sells the majority of its Windows licenses to OEMs and business partners not to retailers so some of the questions and comments were irrelevant. One interesting thing was that OEMs actually wanted Microsoft to delay Vista so that they were ready.
According to Jim there’s a big security advancement in Vista by “the way the code is written” but he wouldn’t let on exactly what this was so if you’re a coder and know what it is then drop us a comment!
All in all the evening was a great opportunity to voice opinions on Windows Vista and Office 2007. Jim gave us his email address and signed our Vista Beta 2 CDs, he is definitely committed to Windows and to listening to customer feedback.
Top left we have badge and a WinHEC bag. Below we have assorted papers that I will probably never read. On the orange WinHEC conference guide, there is a 256mb Lexar memory stick. To the top right we have two shirts. White one provided by Microsoft, black AMD one I won in a HL2 tourney (which I go back for the next round tomorrow).
Steve and Tom got some other nifty Vista-themed swag as well that I missed out on (they got it on Monday — I was working that day). Tomorrow when I head back up, I’ll be bringing my laptop and my camera, so you can be sure I’ll be uploading pictures of some previewed hardware.
It took us 14 hours to get to Seattle from London Gatwick, with a connecting flight at Mineapolis. After checking in at the Grand Hyatt hotel we literally dropped our bags and made our way over to the dinner invite at a restaurant called ‘Wild Ginger’ 6 blocks away from the hotel. There we were met by other community leaders from the Expert Zone.
After the welcome dinner and a chat, we were given a bag with Windows Vista goodies (A Jacket, Baseball cap and a mouse). By now it was approaching 10pm local time, so the others were looking to get back to their hotel (most are staying in the Sheridon) Me and Tom decided to find a bar for a beer before retiring after what was by now well over a 24 hour day.
Not a lot to say about the keynotes this year. They were fairly disappointing compared to last year. As you probably saw it was a spectacle of “ooh wow look at how cool this is” - kind of like Steve Jobs should have been on stage at some point.
We left early to continue installing Beta 2 of Office and Vista. I’ve been running Office for a few days now and it’s greatly improved from the beta 1 release and updated beta 1 release.
Vista seems a little more responsive and stable from 5381. Nothing really different from that build but if you’ve been waiting to run Vista on your main machine then you may want to wait a little longer until RC0 as this release still isn’t at the stage that you could rely on it every day, especially on a mid-range PC.
Next up this afternoon is a couple of sessions and I’ll have a go at the gaming zone and see if I can get into the finals again
