I leaving shortly for Den Haag for the first installment of the Longhorn Developer Preview Tour throughout Europe as part of the Dutch Developer Days 2004. We start tomorrow and I am quite excited since this is the first time I will speak about Indigo in any detail to a larger audience. I've witnessed Indigo "forming" from a distance when the team was still in "stealth mode" and it's great to see how it comes along....
I am getting ready for the Longhorn Developer Preview tour. Now that the whole notebook ordeal is hopefully over, I have been and still am polishing slides and we'll have an online rehearsal today during the day. Furthermore, we're working with Microsoft EMEA on a two day workshop about writing service oriented applications that consolidates all the thinking that I've been blogging about in the past year. The "sample" around which the workshop will center is, not very surprisingly,...
To expect that the newest hardware works with a pre-Alpha version of the newest Microsoft operating system may be expecting a bit much. My Alienware Area51-m just wouldn't boot past the logo screen just 3 seconds after booting from the install disk. It just hung. Bummer.
To expect that a hardware vendor, especially one that's comparatively small and which is specialized in gaming machines and therefore very consumer focused, would even consider providing support on that issue is hopeless.
Is it?...
So my new notebook is an Alienware Area-51m. It's really, really fast, and looks great, but as of now, it doesn't get past the boot screen when I try to install Longhorn. The Longhorn boot screen starts fading in and the machine locks up. Win03 and XP work just fine ("great!" I should say). So I am sitting here, fiddling around with the install options and I am suspecting that something in the BIOS isn't quite...
Blah, Blah ... "...if someone is using it who doesn't have a clue. Just like us." Dismissing vulnerabilities in any operating system like that just to turn around and bash Microsoft while they're at it is just idiotic.