8 January 2007
Acer Ferrari 1000 and Windows Vista Ultimate Review
Posted by Mick (SplaTT) Stanic under: Microsoft .
After spending most of the last two weeks out of the office taking photos around the mountains of the Upper Yarra Valley, last Friday i finally received my “review” AMD Dual-core 64 bit ACER Ferrari 1000 laptop running the final release of Windows Vista Ultimate from Microsoft and it sure is a cute little unit.
I’m setting it up as my photography laptop and will be carrying it around with me as part of my camera setup. I’ve loaded it up with with all of my photo apps and will be giving a pretty good work out over the next few weeks.
I feel i need to make a comment as well in response to the “noise” surrounding these review laptops that they have sent out…though i don’t really see the issue. For a start, the unit might be worth around US $2k, but i certainly didn’t get any crap from anybody when Microsoft invited me over to Redmond to take part in Search Champs v2 which included; a business class return airfare from Australia to the US, business class flights in the US, a weeks accomodation at the W Hotel in Seattle and from what i remember a $200 voucher to use in the Microsoft staff store…that trip must have cost them over AUD $10k
And the crap about being “bought” by Microsoft is ridiculous;
- The three topics that i have blogged about most on this blog happen in the following order; Microsoft (154 posts), Blogging (126 posts) and Podcasting/Mediacasting (102 posts).
- Most of the companies I have started or been involved with in the last 15 years have nearly all been completely based on Microsoft software (both desktop and server) and i have been always been part of the team or the person responsible for making (or approving) those recommendations.
- I have been on beta test groups for quite a few Microsoft products.
- I have attended three of Microsoft Australia’s Tech.ed conferences (and done a major video job for them at one of them) as well as having attended a large number of their other conferences and events over the past 10 years.
- 3 of the last 4 companies i have been involved in have been registered as Microsoft Partners.
- On top of the Search Champs trip, i have been to Microsoft’s Redmond campus a few other times on business trips where i have spent close to a week on each trip in meetings with a wide range of groups (paid for by the companies I was working for)
- I’ve lost track of the amount of times i have been to Microsofts Sydney office and caught up with my good friend Frank Arrigo or had meetings with various other people there.
- I have also had meetings at the ACER office in Sydney as well for a few things – though i don’t know the company, or the individuals that work there, anywhere near as well as Microsoft and a number of its employees.
So I think its pretty safe to say that I am in the “Microsoft camp” and have been for a while and an ACER Ferrari laptop is not going to make me any more favourable than i probably already am towards them.
You can believe or not believe me when i say that I will try and do the most honest review i can based on what i am doing with the machine and the amount of time i will be using it…but what matters is that i will be giving Microsoft (and ACER and AMD) an honest review of the machine and OS which i hope they will take on board as they both move onto developing their next range/versions of software and hardware.
Anyway…thats about it from me on this subject. Since this is my first post for 2007 I also just want to say that hope you all had a great break and that you have a great year ahead…it’s certainly shaping up to be the best and most interesting year that i will probably have ever had…but more on that another time ;)
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