Casa Dell Vista
After months of trying to convince myself to wait until Vista ships, I finally bit the bullet and bought a new PC. Since I plan to buy a nice laptop later, I decided to just get a low-end PC sufficient to hold me over for 6 months to a year. Luckily, I found a great deal ($539) on a Dell Dimension 9200 with a Core 2 Duo 1.86 ghz processor, 1gb DDR2, 256mb NVidia 7300 , etc. At this price, my days of assembling my own PC's are over. :)
Unfortunately, I overlooked one thing in the Dell PC configuration tool - it included XP Home instead of Professional. After a few seconds of berrating myself, I realized that this was just the motivation I needed to download and install Vista RC2.
It has been a while since I last installed/played with Vista (prob around PDC 2005), so I was way overdue for a visit. After a completely painless install, all I can say is "Wow!"
The past instabilities and incomplete featuresets are gone. As far as I can tell, everything just works. Eventhough my hardware (graphics card) specs arent stellar by gaming standards, they were able to run the Aero shell beautifully with all the nifty alpha blending capabilities fully enabled.
Here are my PC's "measurements":
(P.S. I love the Snipping Tool for quick screen grabs like above.)
At this point, I'm not sure how this compares to other systems, but I would guess that the video is a tad low - but acceptable for normal apps and moderate gaming. Just to see if it would help some of the other stats, I also plugged-in a little 1gb USB drive and setup ReadyBoost to see what would happen. Oddly, none of the numbers changed, however, I saw an immediate speed improvement in launching apps, and boot-up.
Regardless, I think I succeeded in finding an affordable "transition PC" while I wait, save, and scheme on which laptop to buy.
Next steps...buy another 1-2gb of RAM, install VMWare or VPC, setup my virtualized dev environment, and start having fun with NETFx 3.0.