Vista at home

So, in a break from my usual technical stuff, I thought I'd talk about something else (closely related) near & dear to me.  Vista is getting very close to shipping.  It's exciting.  People are reall in ship mode around here.  Sometimes it's intense, sometimes it's stressful.  On the whole, though, it's mostly fun.  There's buzz in the air.  And I can't wait till it comes out.  So I installed Vista RC1 on my home machine last week...

   ...and I haven't looked back.  Drivers took a bit to sort out.  I needed to buy a new sound card because the manufacturer made it clear that my 6 year old card was not getting Vista drivers.  Having made it past that, though, I'm very pleased with the result.  Media Center just worked for me.  I went out and bought a TV tuner & hooked it up using my Xbox 360 as an extender, and it's making a great PVR.  The PC hasn't moved an inch, but I get the full MCE experience in the next room.  Office 12 (Beta 2 Tech Refresh) is running like a charm, and I'm using it to review some of the WDK documentation.  Next on my personal to-do list is to start playing around with the sidebar.  The pics & blog plug-ins are awesome, but there's so much more potential there.  Oh, and all this is on the 64-bit edition.  Vista is lookin' very good to me.

- Ben