I have absolutely no idea which parties I have RSVPd to, but I am not flying out directly for CES - I actually have a Windows Vista lab on the Saturday and Sunday before hand. I ahve attended several of these labs, met and made some great friends so am looking forward to it.

There will of course be lots of familiar faces there as well as two guys I have not yet met who are big in this blogosphere thing we have such as Long Zheng and Brandon LeBlanc, however I don't think they are of drinking age so there could be some issues. I will most likely actually meet Robert Scoble this year, met him briefly last year when wandering around with Bink and gawping at plasma televisions the width of main roads, but that will be after CES has started.

Definately alot more people here this year and not all featured communities, hoping to move away from the Windows XP Featured Communities soon to something new with a shinier logo.

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Like other featured community representatives, I have received a laptop from a choice of several laptops, mine arrived yesterday.

Back in October/November Aaron, the guy that deals with everything we throw at Microsoft, worked with AMD and some of Microsoft’s other hardware partners to organise some hardware for us to review and blog about.

I chose the Ferrari 1000 as it is small and powerful; the 5000 certainly does seem to be a lot more powerful but also a fair amount larger. The laptop came in the retail casing and preloaded with Windows x64 as well as several pre-release Acer applications and drivers to get us started.

Its review will most likely be ongoing over the next month or so, originally a potential two parts, but now three with the addition of “Why we received these?” which I will start with now.

Firstly, Long’s post pretty much has things covered: http://www.istartedsomething.com/200...-free-ferrari/ and as...

I have got rid of the overly-dramatic black style for something a little fresher for CES this year and I am determined to drag myself away from the blackjack tables and do some good updates!

The style I am using is pretty much the default, but I will hopefully be making a few changes before I head out as I certainly won't be in the mood to change them once I am out there!

I am going to make the effort and trying to do more smaller blogs than grouping stuff up, looks easier on the eyes.

Windows Media Player has now been out for three or four days and the general concensus seems be good, really liking the x64 edition and have been waiting for it for quite some time having had a look at the first beta on Media Center 2005 before I chose to migrate back to x64 (for some reason) - and Vista of course.

This post has a few points of course as my posts generally do, so here we go. Firstly I like WMP11 alot, most of my music was pretty organised already so the qualms I had with the first beta aren't so important

-- Basically I had an album that was split into three different albums and I couldn't find a way of merging them into a single album without using a third party bit of kit in the RTW version I actually had the same issue after searching for some album art but the drag and drop method seemed to work this time around,...

I was going to open with a swear word, but I have decided not to. I am doing this one for the kids, or at least the clueless ones.

I keep reading about features being ripped out of Vista and how there is no difference between WindowsXP and Vista -- But you never compared Windows 2000 and windows XP in such a way and that was only an upgrade from 5 to 5.1, this is 6 written from the ground up.

For a general idea of whats new check out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows...dated_features

Pretty much all there, of course being a product that is going to replace a previous version of a product that does the same thing, there are going to be the similarities but there is no point replacing something that is tried and testing with something you are not quite sure about.

I reckon the new Mac software, Leopard is going to have similarities to OS X but you don't hear Max users whining about it.

Thinking...