Welcome back. Here's how to get hold of Vista and Longhorn and make the most of TechNet Plus

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Happy New Year and welcome back for those of you who have enjoyed a well deserved break.

I know that some of you will have found it difficult to resist the temptation to play with Windows Vista, Office and Exchange (EVO) when you should have been relaxing!

Following the excitement of the launch there's a great deal of interest being shown by IT Professionals to work out how and when to take advantage of the new products.

TechNet Plus provides a great way to get download access to all of the EVO products together with most Microsoft infrastructure products including betas of “longhorn” server. I'm particularly pleased that there's now a "download" only service which is less expensive and more environmentally responsible than the traditional DVD based distribution. A nice bonus is that there's no need to file incoming DVDs nor to make sure they're with you when you need them - much better.

TechNet Plus Direct (online) costs £230 for new subscribers and £170 for renewals.

TechNet Plus (DVD) costs £330 for new subscribers for a year's membership.

If you're ready (can make the time) to play with Windows Vista then I'd recommend downloading the software from TechNet Plus if you have a fast broadband link - it's 2Gb. Once up and running it's worthwhile downloading the beta of VirtualPC 2007 too. VirtualPC 2007 is available as a free fully functional download and works beautifully on Windows Vista.

Bill Gates showed an early build of Microsoft Windows Virtualisation at last year's Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) which will be with us in the not too distant future. The demo was pretty impressive at it showed how Windows Virtualisation takes advantage of hardware assisted virtualisation. Here's a list of some of the innovative features:

  • You'll be able to host virtual machines of both 64 bit and 32 bit concurrently on a single physical (64 bit) machine
  • Dynamically reallocate CPU cores to individual virtual machines without any downtime
  • Dynamically reallocate network adaptors to individual virtual machines without any downtime

Here’s to a wonderful 2007!