Microsoft just released Windows 7 beta for the general public and if the initial reports are to be believed, it is really far superior than Vista! I am planning on spending some time and upgrading my current ( annoying) Vista to the Windows 7 beta. If you want to read a review of the beta you can check out this piece from Walt Mossberg( Wall Street journal) here. Gizmo also has a nice review here.While you are reviewing the latest and greatest on Tech gadgets, check out NY Times Technology editdor David Pogues opinion here .
Actually David Pogue and Walt Mossberg are the two columnists who are widely regarded in the tech community , these guys can really make or break a product by their reviews. if you want your products to be successful, make sure these guys see you favorably!

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Microsoft just released Windows 7 beta for the general public and if the initial reports are to be believed, it is really far superior than Vista! I am planning on spending some time and upgrading my current ( annoying) Vista to the Windows 7 beta. If you want to read a review of the beta you can check out this piece from Walt Mossberg( Wall Street journal) here. Gizmo also has a nice review here.While you are reviewing the latest and greatest on Tech gadgets, check out NY Times Technology editdor David Pogues opinion here .
Actually David Pogue and Walt Mossberg are the two columnists who are widely regarded in the tech community , these guys can really make or break a product by their reviews. if you want your products to be successful, make sure these guys see you favorably!

I am glad that 64 bit is finally taking off! I am usually an early adopter of new technology, some of this is just part of my job requirement. Take 64 bit for instance, the storage product I work on needed a 64 bit upgrade, because our customers have started demanding it. We are close to wrapping up the 64 bit enhancements, this new 64 bit hardware/software that I purchased can also be used in evaluating our own product! The new machine is HP- pavilion, has an AMD live quad core processor, 4 GB RAM and 500GB hard disk. The notable difference with a 64 bit machine is that now one can have RAM higher than 4 GB. I work a lot on the kernel side of the windows operating system and 64 bit is likely to help there as well. The device drivers are usually restricted to 16k stack limit per thread, now that limit has gone up significantly. Stack overflow was one of the primary reason for driver crashes, not any more. This is a big relief. My new PC is blazing fast and boots up pretty quickly, I am hoping to save some 10-15 minutes of my life everyday waiting for the darn thing to boot up! The only downside so far is that many of the device drivers are still not available for this environment. I found my external wi-fi device form cisco-linksys no longer works and going to their support website tells me the driver is yet not available! Cisco is such a big company and they are not ready with their 64 bit offering, gives me a reason to take pride in our work. Our 64 bit driver has been tested and awaiting general availability shortly, you go to Cisco website and you get TBD on the wi-fi adopter driver. Come on give me a break! Customers need better than that, ask us!!

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I am glad that 64 bit is finally taking off! I am usually an early adopter of new technology, some of this is just part of my job requirement. Take 64 bit for instance, the storage product I work on needed a 64 bit upgrade, because our customers have started demanding it. We are close to wrapping up the 64 bit enhancements, this new 64 bit hardware/software that I purchased can also be used in evaluating our own product! The new machine is HP- pavilion, has an AMD live quad core processor, 4 GB RAM and 500GB hard disk. The notable difference with a 64 bit machine is that now one can have RAM higher than 4 GB. I work a lot on the kernel side of the windows operating system and 64 bit is likely to help there as well. The device drivers are usually restricted to 16k stack limit per thread, now that limit has gone up significantly. Stack overflow was one of the primary reason for driver crashes, not any more. This is a big relief. My new PC is blazing fast and boots up pretty quickly, I am hoping to save some 10-15 minutes of my life everyday waiting for the darn thing to boot up! The only downside so far is that many of the device drivers are still not available for this environment. I found my external wi-fi device form cisco-linksys no longer works and going to their support website tells me the driver is yet not available! Cisco is such a big company and they are not ready with their 64 bit offering, gives me a reason to take pride in our work. Our 64 bit driver has been tested and awaiting general availability shortly, you go to Cisco website and you get TBD on the wi-fi adopter driver. Come on give me a break! Customers need better than that, ask us!!

I finally moved two of my computers to Microsoft Vista – one was a new laptop (Core 2 duo) I bought two weeks ago from Circuit City, San Jose and the other one a HP desktop I had bought last year online. Incidentally last year I also bought a core duo Macbook laptop running OS X version 10.4 aka “Tiger”. The Apple Mac seems to be faster booting than the Vista machines and has more applications pre-installed ( my ten year old is particularly fond of Garage Band and iChat). Vista finally tried to play catchup with Tiger X in terms of desktop search and some other plug and play features. I am still getting used to the Vista, and sometime get frustrated looking for simple utilities like “Command Window” and don’t know how to do file explorer hacks like showing/hiding file extensions. My old firewall stopped working, and I would still get those occasional machine hangs. I tried firewall from three different vendors with the same result, vista not supported! I hope Microsoft can get more ISVs on board and help its customers in a smoother migration!!

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I finally moved two of my computers to Microsoft Vista – one was a new laptop (Core 2 duo) I bought two weeks ago from Circuit City, San Jose and the other one a HP desktop I had bought last year online. Incidentally last year I also bought a core duo Macbook laptop running OS X version 10.4 aka “Tiger”. The Apple Mac seems to be faster booting than the Vista machines and has more applications pre-installed ( my ten year old is particularly fond of Garage Band and iChat). Vista finally tried to play catchup with Tiger X in terms of desktop search and some other plug and play features. I am still getting used to the Vista, and sometime get frustrated looking for simple utilities like “Command Window” and don’t know how to do file explorer hacks like showing/hiding file extensions. My old firewall stopped working, and I would still get those occasional machine hangs. I tried firewall from three different vendors with the same result, vista not supported! I hope Microsoft can get more ISVs on board and help its customers in a smoother migration!!