Free Vista DVD Received from Powertogether.com

With the imminent Windows Vista release, I’m one of the lucky ones who’ll be upgrading today. Thanks to PowerTogether.com and their “watch a few videos, get Vista for free” deal, I’ve got Vista Business in my hand… product key and everything.

The package I got was plain. No box or anything, just a slip-sleeve similar to a trial software package. Inside, however, contains the Vista DVD, covered with the trademark holograms and my very own Product ID. It’ll be nice to drop my RC1 partition for something a bit more permanent.

This is exciting for me as I’ve been running XP Home on my Dell Dimension for a while now as it’s been nothing but a headache trying to do anything with my XP Pro (pre-SP1) upgrade disc. I really miss being able to network/RDC/etc easily with Windows. I don’t use Windows for anything other than seeing how my websites look in IE, and the occasional game or two. With Vista Business, I may do a bit more in Windows… we’ll see how it goes.

I’ll probably do a write up of my thoughts on the new OS within the week now that I’ll be playing with the *final* version, rather than a release candidate. Stay tuned for that.

On a side note, I spent a good portion of the last couple days getting Ubuntu running on a third partition (if you’re counting, that’s XP, Vista RC1, Ubuntu). It’s amazing how much faster Linux runs outside of a virtual console like VMWare or Q. I’m hoping to get a bit more time to play with Ubuntu and get acquainted with the OS as it comes highly recommended by a couple of my buddies.