Not long ago I installed a copy of the Windows Vista Feb CTP sadly though, my graphics card was not good enough to show the aero graphics, I've been enjoying using Vista a lot lately and just couldnt resist not having the AERO graphics, so I went and got myself a nice new card, and finally, I can now see the AERO UI, very very nice!

You can even choose your favourite color theme, adjust the intensity, enable or disable the transparent glass ...etc

Very cool. Here's a screenshot illustration...

It looks like Chris Auld has started his live blogging from Las Vegas for  MIX06. Keep an eye on his blog for live info on whats going on there.

Here's his first post and I'm sure there's more to come..

Ok this was known to be possible, but it wasnt known how. Well now a solution has been posted, you can find it here

Nice! Here's a picture showing XP on Mac

I dont know how long this has been the case, but it looks like Windows Live Mail beta is now available no non US residents. I've signed up for this a while back and received my invite today.

- I can now enjoy a hotmail account with 2Gb space, nice, wont have to worry about downloading my messages every now and then now.
- It integrates very nicely with Windows Live - I really like the grouping of services that Windows Live does. My wish tho is that Windows Live would allow you to plug in other email accounts to it than just hotmail, this will be very handy if it happens I think.

So far I'm very happy with my Vista experience, I've managed to installed WinFX and VS 2005 last night and everything went smoothly with no issues during setup. Will post more as I start playing with WinFX a bit.

One thing I didnt talk about in my previous post of the things I liked, is the way the 'All Programs' menu behaves now. The changes are great. If you recall the old programs menu, you'll remember that you could endup having 3 to 4 panels open and if you slip your hand in the last panel, outch the entire panels would collapse and you have to select the menu,the submenu,thesubmenu of the submenu...etc

The new Tree like expand and collapse behaviour in Vista helps avoid this and it is a really good change I think.

I've also found this great review of the current Vista build and all the previous builds are there too on the site.

I've been using Windows Vista for a few days and here are some first thoughtsI like the new interface a lot. The L&F is very nice (tho no aero for me).

- The way things work now makes it a lot easier to do things.
- If the changes on how you get things done are confusing, you can switch to classic view in some things such as the 'control panel'. I was looking for something in the Vista view that at first was unable to find, then I found the option to switch to 'classic view' - Nice! It's very handy to be able to do things both ways till you are used to the new 'easier' way of doing them.

- The replacement of the 'File' menu such as the case in IE with the new tab like menus is great! This change just seemed to make a lot of sense, not hard to transion - or so I found - even better if this frustrates you, you can still select the option of showing the file menu.

- The tabs in IE and the thumbnail view are amazing.

- Some sites still dont render correctly in IE though, I was however very disappointed that macromedia.com was one of those!!!

- The thing that frustrated me most was the search feature, this has been made much much much more easy that it's too frurstrating... I tried several times to use wild cards in the search box but hmm... it seeems you cant, then was wondering so how do you get to a specific file ...etc. It's all in the menus available witht he search feature.

- I would have imagined you should still be able to  use wild cards, but cant figure how yet.

More on Vista in later posts

There has been a few posts about the new Geekzone blog feature lately.
Want to know what people think.

Mauricio, Tim , Darryl and Nic all posted about this.

I was lucky to get no 9!

Still not convinced you should try it, then here are my comments!

"A security association is reporting what it says is the first virus that can pass from a PC to a mobile device and then erase files."

I guess with viruses targeting new markets in the near future, we might see lots of antivirus software moving there in the future too... I would have never thought I might be running say Norton or McAFee on my Smartphone but who knows; if viruses can go mobile then surely antiviruses will too!

See the article here

With the latest release of the Windows Vista CTP build this week. I was doing some recap with some of the changes made in the history of windows and one of the things that I didnt pay much attention to lately is the Windows 'start' button. Most of you will probably know that the start button was a big talk within HCI for it's inconsistency with user actions - clicking a button called start to shut down - end - a computer ... etc. With a bit of search I found the following link with all the windows buttons from Windows 95 to Vista build 5259 (2 builds back I think) but the button in this build is still the same. So by the looks of it, in the last 3 builds of vista, including the one released this week 5308 the word 'start' is finally no longer going to be present. I think this will make HCI guys happy now

For a recap on the start button in the past 10 years I've included the images I found in the link above.

Windows 95/98/NT 4	Windows 2000/ME
Windows XP Build 2250	Windows XP Build 2257
Windows XP Build 2410	Windows XP Beta 1
Windows XP Beta 2	Windows XP
Windows Server 2003	Windows Media Center 2005
Windows Vista Build 3683	Windows Vista Build 3718
Windows Vista Build 4008	Windows Vista Build 4015
Windows Vista Build 4051	Windows Vista Build 4083 (64-bit)
Windows Vista Beta 1	Windows Vista Build 5219
Windows Vista Build 5259-5308