I finally found some time to download & install the "PDC" version of Longhorn (build 4051), the future replacement of Windows XP, which Microsoft made available to MSDN subscribers.

This Longhorn release was dubbed the "PDC" version because Microsoft first handed out this version to attendees of the Professional Developers Conference held at the end of last October in Los Angeles.

Installing

I decided to install Longhorn on my Pentium 4 system, since my "normal" test-machine is only a PII/350, and wouldn't be up to the task. I removed my hard drives from my system (I have 2 drives in RAID configuration), which in my case is easy to do, since I have them mounted in removable drive trays. I changed over the connection to the normal IDE port on my ASUS P4B533-E board, and installed a WD800BJ hard disk (that's an 80GB Western Digital IDE drive, 7,200 RPM with an 8MB cache). The system has a 2.4 GHz P4 processor, with a 533MHz FSB and 1GB RAM.

The setup portion in Longhorn has been updated from previous Windows versions, and now sports a slick dark look (Figure). There's not much info to enter in the first screens, but there is a summary screen where options can be changed, such as computer name, installation location and others (right now only these two work, so you can't set the user accounts, regional settings, keyboard and time-zone) (Figure).

The "file-copy" part took some 15 minutes, and then Longhorn "claims" in will detect your hardware in about 10 minutes. Well, that part took nearly 20 minutes, so the total install time took roughly 35 minutes. That is still an improvement over Windows XP, which took around 45 minutes to install on the same hardware.

Getting Started

When you log on (Figure) to Longhorn the first time, you'll get to the desktop first (Figure), and after some time, the Side Bar and Taskbar appear (Figure). In its current form, it all seems to crawl along, but that shouldn't mean much (this isn't even a beta version).

There is an important thing to note when looking at this Longhorn build though: The Luna-like visual style included (called "Slate"), does not resemble the final product in any way. The new user interface (called "Aero") will change things a lot compared to this Longhorn build.

What you'll notice first is the new Longhorn wallpaper on the desktop. Next you'll notice the new Sidebar. This is a new bar that is also seen in the new MSN 8.x (Dashboard). In the current Longhorn build, there isn't much functionality in this Sidebar. There's a "classic" clock showing (which doesn't want to display my 24 hour preference underneath, staying instead with the AM/PM view). It also has a Quick Launch "Tile", and the option to add Classic Tray, Slide Show and Sync Tiles.

Start menu

On first glance the Start menu seems similar to Windows XP, but there are a number of differences. Here is what's new on the Start menu (Figure):

• Documents - A Library of all documents on the system
• Photos and Videos - A Library of all image and movie files on the system
• Contacts - A Library of your contacts, groups, and organizations
• Games - A Library of the games installed on your system
• Music - A Library of all audio files on the system
• Computer - A replacement for My Computer in Windows XP
• Hardware and Devices - Hardware and Devices control panel
• Help and Support - Similar as Windows XP, but the Help system will be refined to more closely resemble the Help system from Microsoft's online support (Figure)
• Search - Same as in Windows XP, but the new WinFS-based Search tool is much more powerfull

Libraries

The "Libraries" mentioned above, are "virtual folders". These gather information about files on your system and present them to the users in a collection. This is based on Longhorn's WinFS-based data mining and filtering capabilities. You might have heard WinFS referred to as Longhorns "new File System", however this is not the case. Longhorn's File System is NTFS. WinFS is a database-like storage engine, which is based on technology from SQL Server 2003. What this means is that Longhorn will be able to keep "track" of all your files. For example, the Photos and Videos library will contain all these file locations on your system, so that it doesn't really matter where they are stored on your system, you'll be able to find them in this "folder".

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