A huge step in my Windows Vista journey
Starting tonight, the Toshiba Tecra M5 is once again my primary machine, and I will never go back to Windows XP. I have very recent builds of Windows Vista (#5520) and Office 2007 (#4414) installed on it, and I finally managed to get Virtual Server 2005 R2 installed and configured – it wasn't difficult; I just didn't have time to do it until now. So, I copied over our latest MOSS Demo VM files over to the secondary HDD, added the .VMC file to Virtual Server, and turned on the VM, which appeared to run slightly faster than it had done on Windows XP on this same laptop. Most likely it's because I was able to allocate 1280 MBs of RAM to the VM whereas on XP, I could only give it 1024 MBs. I would surmise from this simple fact that Vista manages memory significantly better than XP. Running the Demo VM was the very last thing for which I had routinely booted up Windows XP, so I'm very happy to say that I won't have to do that anymore. The M400 became my primary machine for a little while since it's pure Vista, but compared to the M5, it's significantly slower and has a shorter battery life.
As for the availability of the MOSS Demo VM (I knew you would ask), my understanding is that we're going to make it available to MS Certified Partners via the Technical Demostration Toolkit (TDT) within the next 4-6 weeks. The Demo VM has been configured with a variety of SharePoint sites and prepopulated with plenty of relevant content. For example, the screenshot below shows the Records Vault feature that Ethan will be blogging about very soon on the our Record Managements Team Blog. I will be using my M5 to demo MOSS at the Advisor Summit Conference next week in Phoenix, so if you're going to be there, stop by the MOSS booth to say "Hi" and see a quick demo of whichever MOSS feature you're curious about.
