ScottGu's Vista High-Performance Hardware Secrets

resource-sucking hardware demands said they're holding off bleeding caterwauling about problems

The hard-drive speed suggestion tends to take people by surprise, but it makes a huge difference for developers running Visual Studio, Guthrie wrote in a post on his blog, noting that default configurations on Levovo Thinkpads, Dell XPS laptops and Apple MacBook Pros all come with less-than-maxed-out hard drives.

"You might assume if you are buying a top of the line laptop that 'of course' it won't have a slow drive. Don't assume this!," he warned.

Guthrie is keynoting tomorrow at Microsoft's DevConnections conference, where he'll show off a blizzard of advances in Microsoft's imminently arriving Visual Studio 2008 and other developer tools and platform updates. A prolific blogger and vocal advocate within Microsoft for greater transparency and community involvement, Guthrie is something of a rock star in the .Net development community -- one Microsoft MVP I interviewed recently called Guthrie's efforts to get Microsoft to share more source code and adopt friendlier intellectual property practices "one of the few remaining glimmers of hope that Microsoft's future is more than just an inevitable liquid capital burnout." (Yes, that's a direct quote from one of their developer-community evangelists.) Today's announcement that Microsoft will open Visual Studio 2008 source code to top ISVs is another sign of the success Guthrie and his fellow developer advocates are having in shifting Microsoft's mentality about community involvement in developing Microsoft's software.

Now, if only the company can meet with similar success in convincing developers that Vista is worth the investment in 2 GBs of RAM and dual-core CPUs...