Igot my new Longhorn box constructed last night. The actually assembly of thebox went really smooth – I’m going to have to go back to Fry’sfor a quieter case fan, but other than that the box built just fine.

For some reason, I thought it would be prudent to install Windows XP on the boxbefore I installed Longhorn. While it was slightly helpful and gave me somereassurance that all the major hardware pieces were working, it turned out tobe a total waste of time. The whole motivation for putting XP on there in thefirst place was to enable dual-boot, and Longhorn wouldn’t have any ofthat. It’s impossible to install Longhorn on top of an existing PC image –Longhorn will blow away the old installation. Don’t let the dual-bootoption in the bootloader fool you – it lies horribly.

Acouple of interesting things that I noticed during installation:

• Everything takes 10 minutes. The installation process will give you a friendly request to “come back in 10 minutes”, but there seems to be a disconnect between Longhorn’s definition of “minute” and the canonical definition.
• The PDC bits are time-limited and will expire in 180 days. That means we will see some more Longhorn bits within six months, even it’s just a patch to extend the expiration date.
• By installing the Longhorn bits, you’re agreeing to tell MS what you think. You’re also implicitly conceding any IP rights to feedback that you might have – so if you tell Microsoft about a cool idea you have and they go and implement it, don’t get your undies in a bundle.

It’stoo bad that the PDC bits don’t include AERO (MS-speak for the newWindows ‘user experience’). Hillel Cooperman’s talk and demogot me all amped for some cool new UI, but the PDC bits don’t have any ofthat flash yet. From a user experience perspective, the PDC bits of Longhornare basically XP with a sidebar. After seeing all the cool stuff Longhorn cando and will do once it’s released, going back to the non-AEROversion is sort of disappointing.

But, overall I’m pretty happy with it. Whidbey’s installed, theLonghorn SDK is installed, and I’m good to go.