I felt very fortunate to get a sneak preview of Windows Vista and to be invited on to their trial programme for it, until the techie boys at LTS (namely one of the most helpful guys I know) informed me they've been playing with it for months. Bah humbug. I still felt a tingle of excitement when I saw it in Paris.
My advice for any Local Authority thinking of a refresh in the next year or so - hang on. It's worth it.
Kris Hoet from Microsoft Europe likes bloggers a lot, being one himself, and took me for a 40 minute spin of some of the features. Basically, Vista will turn PCs into Macs. Almost ;-) I loved the way you can flick through the windows open on the PC à la iTunes (see the picture) and the animated open and close of windows is similar to the way some of the dashboard functions on the Mac work. Oh, and it has it's own sort of pop out dashboard as well with all your useful bits ready for action.
Best of all, though, on a school organisational note, is the ability to tag files so that you can find them even more easily in the Spotlight-like 'live' search (as you type each letter of what you're looking for it updates the list of found files instantly - good, I presume, for those who do not touch type).
The kind of media centre, with integrated photos, music, video and so on will appeal to the family and granny market for all those holiday snaps and rips of the iLife package nicely, getting rid of some of its inefficiencies (changing music on a slideshow is a doddle).
At the rate I'm going through Macs (no. 1, no. 2 and no. 3 [no. 4 making funny hard disk noises already]) I might well consider getting a PC with Vista on board once they are released. Rick has some things to say on what could be better (the automatic updates are nice but seem a little late in the day) but overall, I've been impressed by Gates and co. this time.
Turn a pc into a mac, have you seen this David Pogue video. Raised a smile here.
Posted by: John | December 18, 2006 at 05:22 PM
Or you could switch to Linux. Get everything Vista does and more - for free. Check out this demo or search for "beryl" in google video/youtube for loads of clips. The clips show the eye candy, but the latest Linux distributions are serioulsy productive environments. I get most done when I'm running Linux.
Posted by: Robert Jones | December 18, 2006 at 05:48 PM
I'd love you to bring in a laptop running Linux and give me a spin. Until now it's only hearsay I've had - hardly the basis for me to make comparisons. Can that be my Chrissie present?
Posted by: Ewan McIntosh | December 18, 2006 at 06:22 PM
If I could I would. I don't have a laptop running Linux unfortunately. If only ELC had ....but that's a different discussion!
You're welcome to pop in to my house in North Berwick and see my desktop in action any time :)
Posted by: Robert Jones | December 18, 2006 at 07:11 PM
Hi Ewan,
I've ubuntu running on my 'masterclass' laptop, happy to let you play with it. (I lost windows in a partitioning accident;-)) Looks like a nice clean gui. I had some audacity woes, but browsing, blogging etc is fine. I think you might miss keynote. Best get a new macbook, Parallels and run as many OSes as you like. I am saving up.
Posted by: John | December 18, 2006 at 09:48 PM