Wizage.NET

I bought one of these sweet looking devices about a week and a half ago. At first I thought it was wonderful, but as I began to use it more and more I realised that it was severly underpowered and wouldn’t be able to handle what I wanted it to do. Quickly I was using it as an extremely expensive MP3 player. So I decided I’m going to send it back. It’s not worth the money and it will never be able to do what I need it to do.

So what am I going to do instead? Well, first I got a Zune. It’s an 80gb MP3 player for less than many others. So that’s all my MP3 functions taken care of. Next I need to deal with the “anywhere Internet” part of the device. For that I’m going to get a Nokia N810. It’s half the price of the Samsung and does everything I want it to. It’s also running Linux so I can hack the hell out of it.

So, in a few weeks I should be doing a review of the N810.

So you may know, or may not know, that I have a tablet PC. I love my tablet, and I love it even more now that it has Vista on it. The new onscreen keyboard is great. You can see it hiding in the screenshot of my desktop in the last post. I’ll point it out for you just in case:

It likes to hide most of the time. It casts a small shadow on the desktop and is bearly noticable. When you hover your mouse over it though, it pops out and looks like this:

Then when you click it, it slides out from it’s nice little hiding place. If you have ever used XP Tablet edition then you’ll know how annoying the little popup writing area is. Half the time it pops up somewhere you don’t want it to, or it docks to the top or bottom of the screen automatically and just causes problems. So here’s what the new one looks like:

I really like the drop shadow on it. My machine doesn’t support Areo so these little things make me feel like I’m not using XP anymore. Having used XP since Beta 1, all those years ago, I’m a little sad to see it go, but on the other hand I’m glad that I’m going to get to play with yet another one of Microsofts creations. Hopefully this one will be better than the last.

I got an official invite to take part in the Pre-RC1 install of Vista today. So I’ve downloaded it and installed it. Here is my nice Pre-RC1 vista installed on my laptop as my primary O/S:

Yes, I have strange tastes in wallpaper, and for Jeff here is the current process list:

I’ll probably post some kind of review of this build of Vista between now and RC1, but I will say this, it’s WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY better than beta 2, so if you have only used that (or an older build) make sure you give RC1 a shot. If it’s better than this build it’s going to be really nice.