Today, I found some time and watched the Microsoft WinHEC conference opening message. Wow! They have some really cool technologies coming out along with a few I am not too sure how the will perform.  Such as Windows Vista, Windows Server Longhorn and Office 2007!

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/winhec/default.mspx

Collaborating Wireless:

This was cool! When you are in the area of another laptop (or device) that is running Vista and configured to share, you can open a sharing session and invite others into that session even without service in the location. It is a type of instant group session sharing any files you wish.

GUI:

The new Windows Vista GUI (Graphic User Interface), is pretty nice and even more so with applications that are designed for it. File previews that quickly show the first page of your documents in large thumbnail images or when you more of items, they enlarge to clearly see them. There are features I will grow to depend on!

Touch Screen Interface:

It is obvious to me that LCD touch screens will be in my near future. Windows Vista makes such good use of this technology, I am sure I will be spoiled quite quickly.

Media Center features:

Having Media Center functionality built in will be a major plus! In the demo, it was nice to see how easily video is available on all your PCs. Now add that with Xbox360 providing easy access to all your media and you have a dynamite package. I personally, did not think much about having an Xbox until Windows Vista!

Terminal Services via Browser

In the demo, it was cool how they accessed their remote machine using Terminal Services via the Internet Browser. That could be handy at times! Of course, I wonder about security.

Internet Phones via MSN Live Messenger

This is another device I see in my near future. It would be handy to use the PC to make and receive phone calls via the Internet Phones not to mention cheaper. The sound quality did not play very good on my machine during the demo video though. Might have been in the compressing of the video demo though.

I remember back when I was in Columbus Ohio using a Sprint PCS phone. When I called to other Sprint phones (or at least the ones I usually called), at times I could not even understand what they were saying. It surely has to be better than that :)

FlexGo

This is one area I am not sure about. The idea is a person pays a portion of the price to have a PC and then pays for hourly usage of the computer each month. Seems with the price of PCs that it would just be cheaper to purchase one. But I guess they are looking at the price of the hardware and a bunch of software on top.

Server Virtualization:

On a heavy technical note, there was talk on server virtualization. I have used VM Ware in the past to run multiple test platforms on a single box and at times to act as several servers for testing purposes. Normally, I would only use them as a “test” box due to performance.

Microsoft is pushing server virtualization to emulate high end boxes such as virtual 64 bit machines with 4 – 8 processors. I personally do not understand why they would want to make them virtual. If you are laying out the cash for the primary server and all the software it requires, why not just buy two smaller servers and have full power available? The only upside I could see is that you can scale the virtual server up when you need it, but it seems like you would still pay more for less performance.

Conclusion:

All in all though, it looks pretty cool. They say the Windows Vista Preview will be out shortly. About time to get a bunch of new hardware :)

The free preview version of the new Microsoft Office 2007 beta is available for download or you can pay for shipping and handling and have the CD's sent to you:

http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/default.mspx

You have the option to download many different Office applications:

• Office Professional Plus 2007
• Visio Professional 2007
• Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager
• Project Server 2007
• Project Professional 2007
• Office Groove 2007
• Office Groove Server 2007
• Office OneNote 2007
• SharePoint Designer 2007
• SharePoint Server 2007 - Enterprise
• Office Forms Server 2007

All of these applications are time limited to stop functioning on Feb 1, 2007.  That gives you plenty of time to play with them.  There are also 64 bit versions of a couple of the server products. 

Yesterday, I noticed that Firefox no longer saved the window placement or size when I exited.  No matter what I did, it always came up the same size and place.

After a bit of digging, I found that this is related to a corrupted “LocalStore.rdf“ file.  Not only will this stop the updating of the window placement and size, the document I read pointed out that the search engine list in Mozzila was missing (not sure how I missed that one).

Well, here is a document showing a fix for the problem:

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Search_engines_disappear_from_Search_Bar

I did NOT use the method above, and instead, with Firefox closed, simply renamed the file "localstore.rdf" (located in your ApplicationData/Mozilla/FireFox/(some profile name)/localstoer.rdf) to something else and then rebooted FireFox.  No problems at all.

While performing this fix and updating a few things, I noticed they updated an extention called “AutoFill“ to .03 which is compatible with the latest version of Firefox.  This is a huge time saver when enter data such as name, address, phone number, email, etc.  Often with the click of one icon, it will fill in all those fields.  You can also add more profiles so that you can have one for work, home, play, etc.

Remember those old School House Rock videos on Saturday morning cartoons? You know, the "I'm just a bill, on Captial Hill.." or "Zero, my hero.." or "Conjuction junctions, what's your function..".

This one reminds me of those old videos.  It is about storage on the Hitachi storage devices..