As detailed previously, after canceling my two year Pandora pre-order, I decided to put the money towards a Sager gaming laptop. As mentioned, this was going to be my first true gaming PC since an old Windows XP Dell desktop from I-don't-remember-when (that system is in my basement office and used as-needed). Well, the laptop arrived earlier today, so I decided to do a Windows 7 Experience score comparison between that and our other current systems, most of which, unlike the Sager, do not feature discrete graphics cards. The results were startling. I'll start with the oldest system first:

Game Developers using Visual Studio are able to create games that can be made cross compatible between Windows (Microsoft) Operating Systems, including Windows Phone 7 and the Xbox 360. 90% of the generated code is the same between the various target platforms, leaving about 10% for platform specific stuff. Perhaps one could look at it as some sort of SDL-layer?

In this article, Microsoft demos a cross-platform game that can be run on a computer with Windows 7, a mobile phone 7, and the Xbox 360 console. A video shows how a Microsoft employee starts the game on one device, continues it and finishes it on others. The progress made within the game is automatically transferred from one platform to the other - probably by use of the Windows Live platform.

Windows Phone 7 development is mostly done with Silverlight and XNA.

Cross platform gaming between PC and Xbox 360 was possible before, just take a look at the game Shadowrun.

I'm issuing a "buyer beware" on the various Microsoft Windows 7 Upgrades that were announced recently. I just got burned trying to upgrade my Windows Vista Home Premium (64 bit) to Windows 7 Professional.

I heard about this from Leo Laporte on one of his TWiT.TV podcasts, specifically "Leo Laporte - The Tech Guy!", May 13, 2009, edition. Apparently Windows 7 is the "best Windows ever", is terrifically stable and performs much better on the same hardware than Vista. The best part? Microsoft is giving out unlimited product keys for both the 32- and 64-bit versions until at least June of this year, and the free license won't expire until March 2010. I'm very, very tempted to give this a go on my home Gateway Tablet PC, though as a critical "production" system and considering my present time constraints, I'm not really looking forward to dealing with any potential issues. With that said, I wouldn't mind more stability than I'm getting from Vista and I certainly have trouble resisting trying new tech.

One other interesting thing that Laporte mentioned - and I may have misheard since I was doing other stuff while listening - is that this release candidate may include the embedded version of Windows XP that runs under the embedded version of Virtual PC. I have been unable to verify that as of this writing, though I could just not have seen it in Microsoft's notes. That would certainly be another big plus in my book, as I have a few software items that require XP. (At the same time, I am running low on hard drive space, so the point is probably moot anyway in my case.)

Anyone else considering this? The download and more information are on the official Microsoft Website, here.

The Windows 7 beta 1 has a new 'experience index/rating' that is quite different from the one we know from Vista. In contrast to the maximum score of 5.9 in Vista an index of 7.9 can be gained in Windows 7.

Today created a triple boot Windows XP/Vista/Windows 7 system - read this to find out how and how I will compare the 3 systems in a real world situation.