I saw Vista at Northern Voice ... very interesting

Those of us attending MooseCamp about a week ago at Northern Voice got a good look at Vista. Robert Scoble and Chris Pirillo did the demo.  While the UI changes are slick and cool, it's the under the hood stuff that I'm really looking forward to in this upgrade.

Let's take sound and video.  In Vista ... well multitasking (e-mail, browsing, etc) isn't going to make your work music playing start to sound like a 45 played a 33 (yeah I'm dating myself).

Networking.  The whole networking stack was written from the ground up.  End result?  IPv6 support and better (like 20x better) throughput.

Memory.  This is very interesting.  RAM is more dynamic.  In fact you could slap in your handy flash drive and use that as RAM.  Yeah, cool.  I talked with both Robert and Chris while it isn't going to be a feature that is given a lot of attention, it is going to be there.  I can see this being used a temporary "gee I need to export this large file to MP3"  tool.

One note I did pick up ... Vista is going to be a video card intensive OS.  So if you're looking at a new machine, look at a good amount of RAM (I'm glad I have a gig), above average video card (ATI for me), and well a nice processor isn't going to hurt (64 bit for me).

How close is it?  Some members of the Windows team are already using it day to day.  Beta 2 is going to be "dog food" soon ... meaning that they are going to have to use it.  RC2 ... not long from now.

I'm really hoping to get my hands on it soon.

Tags: Northern Voice, Moose Camp, Vista, Scoble, Chris Pirillo