Windows Vista Demo @ My School

Of all the days for a Microsoft Representative to come to my school, it was on Friday the 13^th. The presenter was actually an alumnus of my school which was pretty cool. He went through talking about why we needed Vista. After talking for around 15 to 20 minutes, we saw a demo. The demo went through features like:

Going through the newer Vista features, Shadow Copy allows you to backtrack to earlier versions of an edited file. You don’t have to worry about overwriting information in an important document. The one stipulation with this is that the first version of the edited file is not held for a very long time if you constantly edit the file. The time the file is kept for was not said but the disclaimer was put out there. DreamScene is an add-on for Vista that allows you to use movie clips as your background. We were told that the animated background should continue to work while using Aero Flip but DreamScene became static and there was a loud applause from the audience.

Going through some of the Office features, the Equation Editor is a feature that I’ve always wanted. It supplies you with some key equations such as the Quadratic Formula as well as allows you to add your own equations. It also allows you to edit some of the key equations provided. Citations are another cool feature that allows you to easily add references to your papers without going to sites like EasyBib. Citations does not allow you to add research sites and use them as a template for research coming from one site so hopefully this will be included in updates to come. SmartArt adds a nice touch to presentations but is in reality a shiny version of AutoShapes. Groove is a P2P application that allows you to share files although it was not demoed because it required some kind of log in information.

The presenter offered people who came a chance to win one of 15 copies of Vista Ultimate, 5 copies of Microsoft Office 2007, 5 copies of Vista Business, 2 copies of Gears of War and 1 copy of Halo 2. I won none of the prizes but at the end of the day, it didn’t really matter because Engineering students get Microsoft software for free via MSDN Academic Alliance (MSDNAA). The only software that is not offered is Microsoft Office and Windows Vista Ultimate. The reasons for why these pieces of software are not provided are due to intellectual property. Windows Media Center uses a certain codec or library that is property of Adobe. Adobe is making sure that they are paid for these codecs, which makes it more difficult for Microsoft to release Vista to students for free.

I did ask about Windows Mobile 6 but the presenter had little to no knowledge as to when it will be released via updates from T-Mobile or any other carrier. He did say that Cingular and Microsoft are somewhat disconnected due to the deal they made with Apple. He also talked about possibilities of the Zune Phone coming to T-Mobile if it’s GSM. Again, he referred to Cingular’s iPhone commitment.

I had my T-Mobile Dash on me at the time but no camera so I was able to get a video of the presenter’s Xbox 360 video background. It is posted below.

[youtube]QZes5dyWgFE[/youTube]

Update 1:————————–

Actually Microsoft Office is not offered in MSDNAA because its the piece of software Microsoft has to make money off of to offer their other software for free the presenter said. The intellectual property with Adobe relates only to Media Center and versions of Windows Vista with it (Home Premium and Ultimate).

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JAmerican