Having finally gotten a chance to install Vista on a machine of mine, I was pleasantly surprised at how much cleaner and simpler the install routine for Vista is compared to previous versions. I’ve been installing Windows operating systems since Windows 3.1 and this was by far the fastest and easiest install I’ve had to with Windows. And that’s even accounting for the rather low-end machine I put Vista on…in this case a Dell I used from Code Camp and the one I was playing with XNA on (My Vista Experience score was a whopping 1.0! ;) )
Having installed Vista RC1 on that laptop, I’m next going to procure a couple of machines at BrainThump Labs and work with Vista Ultimate Edition and Vista Enterprise Edition to see what’s what between them.
After that I’m gonna think about what kind of nifty sidebar gadgets I might want that don’t exist so I can try my hand at making one. Since my code-fu won’t depend on me having a spiffy graphics card, maybe my adventures with Vista Gadgets will be more fun than my adventures with XNA so far. Don’t get me wrong, I love gaming and all, but with my current choice of hardware, I don’t have a nice box for XNA development and that’s made it a bit less fun and more frustrating than I had anticipated.