A week ago in the evening we brought home a new Gateway machine powered by Windows Vista Home Premium.

Today I’m trying to do my daily RSS reading and blogging using it. I haven’t been using Vista very much for anything work-related and would like to put it through the paces on that front. Vista has been disappointing thus far on the entertainment/gaming side and now I’d like to see how it does with some blogging and some coding/work stuff today. We also tried out Wal-mart’s new video download service buying the movie Crank ($16.12 after tax) for both the portable and standard PC version. Would like to test burning that movie to a DVD and try to transfer to a portable device as well.

From astroturfing to FUD spreader
It’s curious that when I was saying that I liked Zune — and sticking up for it — in several posts here and elsewhere, I was accused of astroturfing and now I’m getting some pushback for saying I’m unhappy with Windows Vista so far. Isn’t the internet fun? Maybe people criticizing me should stop with the conspiracy theories.

My feedback is never going to be positive all the time — nor should it be if I’m being honest — for any company including my own. There’s always something that can be worked on and improved and that’s what you’ll continue to see me sharing here. I’m not in bed with Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc and can and will use other company’s products and services any time I feel like doing so. I find the whole ‘astroturfing’ and then FUD accusation rather humorous.

I don’t hate Microsoft like some people do and have been using Windows XP Pro for my day to day work. However, at the same time I also enjoy using the Tablet PC and my Mac and not too long ago installed Linux on a box. We run pretty much all Linux-based servers (Apache) for our web business. I’m platform agnostic. If Google or somebody else comes out with a new OS I’ll give that a try too most likely.

As mentioned yesterday, my wife will be at Microsoft on Valentine’s day doing some testing and I was there last month. I’m happy to do beta testing on their products in exchange for software. It’s keep me from having to buy as much Microsoft software, which cuts down our business expenses.

Firefox over IE on Vista
Have already waved goodbye to the default Internet Explorer 7 on Vista. Some of the text was getting munged on sites and unreadable and I was more than happy to download and start using Firefox 2.0.0.1. My first attempt to download and install Firefox resulted in errors, but the second install worked fine. Even installed a couple alternate Firefox themes.

More reviews on the way
Not sure if I mentioned this yet, but I went through the process of grouping all graded reviews in a special Hmm reviews page. If you were wondering if I did a graded review of something you were interested in, try that page first or use the search. I’ve actually written over 500 reviews in the last 3.5 years here but have only graded about 20% of them. The criteria for when I grade and don’t grade something isn’t very scientific and I’m working on something more defined and consistent to apply across all reviews shared here.

While talking reviews, on one of the recent Hmmcasts I remarked that the ReviewMe blog hadn’t been updated since November and the paid review requests for here had gone somewhat quiet. To my surprise in the last week I’ve had three new requests come in to work on and will be getting those done soon. How about that? I wonder if the ReviewMe gods were listening and sent some more review work my way?

Ok, enough of the general update on what’s going on, just wanted to mention I’m trying to do some regular work on the Vista machine today as a test. Most of this post was written in Firefox on the Vista powered machine in fact.

Off to install more apps I need for work, RSS reading (got to catch up there) blogging and more. I’m also keeping a detailed Vista crash log so I can note any problems I’m having using the .LOG notepad trick (yes, this still works in Vista!).

Thank you for reading and I hope you’ll take a few moments and watch a few Hmmcasts (videos are averaging around 2.5 minutes to date) and leave some feedback. This Hmmcast journey has been fun so far, I hope they make you smile and/or make you go hmm. Just remember, 4:20pm PST every weekday, save for holidays and vacation. You’ll see them fly across your RSS reader so no need to subscribe to anything new.

• Breaking in new shoes and new OS
• Download Microsoft Office 2007 beta
• New owner Vista breakdown report, error message click frenzy
• Rollout of Windows XP SP2 delayed
• No XP Home security updates after 12/31/2006
• Free AOL movie today if you install their video player software