MSDNEvents and Free Vista?

[Justin Cooke]

Hi All, Has anyone here actually gone to one of these free, one-day MSDN or TechNet Events? The one I'm considering attending is about Vista IT support and development. Specifically, I'm wondering if they're really giving away fully licensed copies of Vista. Here's the quote from the email: "Join us for a free day of live learning with the most experienced IT pros and developers in your local area. You'll get plenty of useful tips, and still have time to swap stories with your peers. Plus, you'll leave with a copy of Windows Vista® Ultimate Edition 32 bit SP1, just for attending. Take your technical skills to the next level with MSDN and TechNet Events." I realize this will mostly be an ad for Vista, but it's hard to pass up a free copy of the OS. NOTE: I plan to stick with XP, but I'd like to be able to see how Vista runs, especially because I'm a gamer and I want to check out DirectX 10 (for Crysis and Flight Sim X) and you must have Vista for DX10. So, anyone know if they really are giving away useable copies of Vista? Thanks! Justin

[Christian Graus]

They have a box of those things out back, they have to give them away for when they start selling it with SP2....

Christian Graus No longer a Microsoft MVP, but still happy to answer your questions.

[realJSOP]

Yeah, they're giving away VS2008 Standard as well...

"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001

[Justin Cooke]

Hey, that's OK with me...I'll gladly take their trash. :)

[No e]

Yep, I attended one. Got a full fresh install of Vista Ultimate and attended another event to get my version of Office. I liked the price. Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeetttt deal for something I was not quite willing to pay for considering the initial feedback. I now have a Vista machine running VirtualMachine, a few instances of XP, Linux and am quite happy...

[Single Step Debugger]

I know only about these General Motors TechNet Events. They giving you a free Cadillac for the participation, the past year model though.

The narrow specialist in the broad sense of the word is a complete idiot in the narrow sense of the word. Advertise here – minimum three posts per day are guaranteed.

[Rob Graham]

Justin Cooke wrote:

useable copies of Vista

isn't that an Oxymoron?

[Justin Cooke]

I won't say no to that, either! Lately it seems MS is giving away so much software. I remember back when I was in school and was happy to be able to buy Visual Studio 6.0 on the academic license for 2 or 3 hundred bucks. I think the full price was ~$600. Now, you can get these express versions for free and they're giving away the OS and VS Standard and, soon their virtual machine software. An interesting change... Thanks, Justin

[Justin Cooke]

Well, yes, I guess you're right :) My wife got a cheap Toshiba laptop last year that had Vista on it and only 1 gig of RAM. She's not upset about how slow it is, but man it's horrible. I'm curious to see if Vista's actually quick (and useable) on my desktop with 3 gigs.

[realJSOP]

Justin Cooke wrote:

Lately it seems MS is giving away so much software.

That's because nobody wants to spend money on it.

"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass..." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997
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"...the staggering layers of obscenity in your statement make it a work of art on so many levels." - Jason Jystad, 10/26/2001

[Dan Neely]

upping my acer laptop from 1 to 4gb(3 usable) brought it upto xp level performance. Not quite as fast as my XP desktop but that was a significantly faster machine to begin with c1d1.73 vs a64 2.8, 5400rpm vs 5x7200rpm in raid3, but better than the pm1.6 1gb 7200 XP laptop I had at work at the time.

Today's lesson is brought to you by the word "niggardly". Remember kids, don't attribute to racism what can be explained by Scandinavian language roots. -- Robert Royall

[Scott Barbour]

Years ago, I got a free copy of Windows 2000 Professional by attending an event. So I'm going to say, that yes, it is very likely that they are giving away free copies of Vista.

[Roger Wright]

Justin Cooke wrote:

you'll leave with a copy of Windows Vista® Ultimate Edition 32 bit SP1, just for attending.

It's a 30 minute free trial edition. It expires as soon as it's done booting. :)

"A Journey of a Thousand Rest Stops Begins with a Single Movement"

[Monark]

John Simmons / outlaw programmer wrote:

That's because nobody wants to spend money on it.

May be they want to make their product popular first then increase the price ( or double the price). It could be a marketing strategy :)

[l a u r e n]

:laugh:

"mostly watching the human race is like watching dogs watch tv ... they see the pictures move but the meaning escapes them"

[John M Drescher]

Roger Wright wrote:

It's a 30 minute free trial edition. It expires as soon as it's done booting.

That was my first experience with Vista. A dell workstation class $3300US dual core laptop with 4GB of memory took over 30 minutes for the initial boot. I could not believe it. I wanted to call them and charge Dell or Microsoft for my time. Although I admit working (briefly) on other peoples much less powerful Vista laptops this is not the norm.

John

[Mike Dimmick]

Did you repave it? If not, quite likely some Toshiba shovelware or other pessimisations (as in, opposite of optimisations) could have been slowing it down. I use Windows Vista Business x64 at home on a 2GHz Core 2 Duo (T7200) with 2GB RAM. It's great.

"Multithreading is just one damn thing after, before, or simultaneous with another." - Andrei Alexandrescu

[Mike Dimmick]

You should repave it. The OEMs ship a load of crapware that simply messes up the system beyond belief. Commonly they come with all the drivers that could possibly apply to that class of systems, so they only need one disk image, and some drivers (and accompanying utilities) don't react well to their hardware not being present. I run Vista x64 fine on a Dell Latitude D820, 2GHz Core 2 Duo T7200 with 2GB of RAM, although I do have a 7200rpm hard disk. Latency of disk access can be the predominant factor in system performance. This system came with XP SP2 - installing Windows Vista (as a clean installation, not upgrading XP) took around 15 minutes.

"Multithreading is just one damn thing after, before, or simultaneous with another." - Andrei Alexandrescu

[Lost User]

Justin Cooke wrote:

it's hard to pass up a free copy of the OS.

Why? Seriously... why?

[Justin Cooke]

"repave", huh? I like that term :) But no, I haven't -- my wife really doesn't seem to notice the slowness and doesn't do much with it. She'd rather I not even touch it. I only ever do just to fool around a bit in Vista. Note also that her laptop only has 1 GB. Oh, and you're right about the Toshiba crap, especially these "Flash Cards" (or other similarly named POS). The default drive image from Toshiba includes these stupid drop-down, semi-transparent "flash cards" that come alive any time you use the function key -- you know, for adjusting the screen brightness or muting quickly, for ex. Problem is -- they can take 5 - 15 secs just to wake up and react to the keys -- completely defeating the purpose of the special laptop function combo keys. Anyway, disabling those made a huge difference, so now she can just use the keys and they react in seeming real-time. When I get around to it, I'll bring her up to 2 GB and I expect that'll help quite a bit. Thanks, Justin