palmit.commentary: Vista Beta 2 and Office 2007 Beta 2 Bits Installed

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May 30, 2006

Vista Beta 2 and Office 2007 Beta 2 Bits Installed

Windows Vista

I installed the Vista Ultimate Beta 2 and Office 2007 Beta 2 bits on my Motion Computing M1400 tablet PC last week. I installed the bits in a computing fit after I managed to trash my user profiles on the M1400. Frankly, I didn’t expect Vista to install properly – I thought I’d waste and hour or two and end up with a fresh copy of XP on the machine. To my surprise I was wrong.

NOTE: I don’t like the way Windows manages user profiles – I’ll spare you the rant.

Vista Beta 2 installed on the M1400 flawlessly and I was installing it over a networked DVD drive. The installer even re-started the system once or twice during the process and it just kept going. I performed a “clean upgrade” which is different than a typical upgrade – it dumps the old Windows XP installation into a windows.old folder which you can delete after you’ve transferred any files or folders you might want off the old system. The installation process took between an hour and two and to my surprise I was sitting in the seat of a brand new working Vista installation when it was over – cool.

Vista isn’t a Windows XP update – the U.I. is radically different. I’m not going to get into the details – there are a lot of other places to go for that kind of thing. I can tell you that it’s going to take some getting used to. At this point I’m using the integrated Help features (which are in pretty good shape considering it’s Beta software) to bounce around the OS. 1^st impressions are good. I’m looking forward to the fresh perspective. In my opinion this upgrade is long over due – the OS needs to keep up with innovations in the areas of tagging and RSS.

Office 2007 Beta 2 (I installed it for OneNote 2007) also installed flawlessly and installed these bits over a wireless network just for kicks. Again, 1^st impressions are good and it’s refreshing to see something new. The ribbon (widely employed throughout the system) will take some getting used to but I can see the logic behind a task oriented U.I. – we’ll see how it does long-term. OneNote 2007 is great (I’m a big OneNote fan) – the OneNote 2007 team spent a lot of time listening to their customers and making improvements that makes sense – improvements that will really improve the usability of the application. More and more my work day is spent in Outlook and OneNote. Thanks OneNote team.

More to come as I bounce off of new things in the software so many of us use.

Posted by Cale on May 30, 2006