MSDNEvents and Free Vista?

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

Justin Cooke

Really, it's only because I want to check out DirectX 10 and MS has made Vista a requirement for upgrading beyond DX 9. Nice of them, huh? (Well, along with the fact that I may someday want to ensure something I develop works on Vista. No reason to pay for the disk if I don't have to.) -Justin

Paul Conrad

I went to the Heroes Launch they had back in April. Best thing was the free VS2008 Standard Edition. The SQL Server 2008 presentation I went to was also very good.

Justin Cooke wrote:

if they really are giving away useable copies of Vista?

Yes, they do, but why bother with the 32 bit edition?

"The clue train passed his station without stopping." - John Simmons / outlaw programmer "Real programmers just throw a bunch of 1s and 0s at the computer to see what sticks" - Pete O'Hanlon "Not only do you continue to babble nonsense, you can't even correctly remember the nonsense you babbled just minutes ago." - Rob Graham

dandy72

> Plus, you'll leave with a copy of Windows Vista® Ultimate Edition 32 bit SP1, You're 100% sure that's not just the service pack on a CD? If it was the full OS, then going by typical Microsoft terminology, they'd instead call it Windows Vista® Ultimate Edition 32 bit with SP1. But that's just me; I've been called cynical before...

Justin Cooke

Actually, that's what I was worried about, because according to their language, it could just be the SP1 on CD. Of course, that would really piss off a bunch of people, but you never know... -Justin

dandy72

I wouldn't put it past them. Either way, let us know...