David M Williams
Wednesday, 09 September 2009 06:44
IT People -
Training
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It’s on, and I’m here. Microsoft Tech-Ed Australia is running from today until Friday 11th September on the sunny Gold Coast of Australia. An incredible 2000+ attendees are roaming about with HP Mini netbooks. Demonstrations have already begun of Exchange 2010, Office 2010 and Visual Studio 2010.
Pleasingly, the most
popular (that’s right, “popular” – not “common”) name is “David” with some 99 Davids in attendance, surpassing even the Johns.
Over 2,000 paid attendees have converged on the Gold Coast and had room permitted Microsoft still had 400 hopefuls on wait lists. Officially, Microsoft is citing the number of female participants at a record-topping 200 (although my esteemed colleague
Beverley Head has been counting and suspects this number includes staff and exhibitors.)
In a first for Tech-Ed anywhere in the world – and possibly any technical conference anytime, anywhere – all paid attendees have received a
HP Mini 2140 netbook (“or mini note,” as HP prefer to call it.)
This netbook is surprisingly pleasant to use; while still retaining the diminutive form-factor of a typical netbook it has a responsive keyboard with decent-sized keys and a crisp screen.
Mind you, the maximum resolution of 1024x576 is proving insufficient for certain applications. One of my first actions was to download the Cisco VPN client thinking I could aim to work off the netbook for the entire week and avoid touching my regular, 15” ASUS Lamborghini laptop.
Alas, Cisco have mandated a minimum height of 600 pixels (heaven knows why – it’s a VPN client, not a CAD program!) so the installer refuses to co-operate.
The unit is preloaded with Windows 7 Ultimate (I expect the
Starter Edition, allegedly aimed at netbooks, would not be met with as much acclaim) and contains an Intel Atom N270 CPU, 2GB of RAM and carries a Windows system rating of 2.1.
The WiFi network seems to be suffering no strain under the weight of so many connected units. A quick visit to an online Broadband speed test showed a Telstra Internet connection with a download speed of 2.30Mb/s and upload of 6.65Mb/s. Such skewed asynchronous results suggest a large number of simultaneous downloads taking place, but still plenty of bandwidth to go around.
In a twist from previous years, there was no singular superstar keynote presenter. Instead, representatives from the various tech streams presented entertaining demonstrations of the upcoming tech from the Redmond software giant.
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