Just installed Longhorn...again.

OK, so I probably should've just gone to bed, but I figured what the heck, and went ahead and installed the Longhorn PDC preview on my new Dell PowerEdge 400sc. What a difference proper hardware makes! Not only did the install go much faster than when installing in a VM (no big surprise there, other than the extent of the improvement), the hardware detection phase only took a little longer than the 10 minutes it claimed (as opposed to the couple of hours reported by some). The install was certainly both easier and faster than any other version of Windows I've installed (including the Windows Server 2003 install I did last night).

When the install was complete, Longhorn had automatically detected and installed drivers for every piece of hardware on the machine, with the exception of the video card and the sound card. Once I pointed the New Hardware Wizard at the correct (XP) drivers, both installed without a hitch. I'm liking this so far...

The best part is that the performance on this box is a pleasant surprise. Sure, there's the occasional drawing hiccup when I auto-hide the sidebar, but the zooming of the clock and/or icons in Windows Explorer is very smooth and not at all laggy. Definitely goes to show you that if you give Longhorn some video RAM to play with, it runs pretty well, even in alpha. Nice work, folks!

Next up is installing Whidbey and the Longhorn SDK...but I think I'll let that wait until tomorrow.