Microsoft Office launches in 1/2 second

So I've been running the Windows 7 Beta for a little over a month (on a 2-year old Dell laptop and an even older Dell desktop), and while I still think this is what Vista ought to have been, it's suffering from the dreaded Windows cruftification:

• Everything -- boot, standby, resume, hibernate, application launch -- is slowing down,
• My desktop refuses to shut down half the time, and
• I had to turn the new sharing feature called Homegroup off because it was breaking my Linksys wireless router (symptom: it would refuse to form wireless network connections with the Dell laptop without power cycling).
  

So it looks like Windows 7 has yet to solve one of the biggest problems with Windows: the distressing tendency for applications to dramatically slow down in all the everyday things that really matter to me.

So with that backdrop, enjoy this video about how some extreme hardware can come to the rescue of sloppy Microsoft coding. Skip the first few minutes about how they set up the extreme array of solid-state drives, and skip to about the 2:04 marker to see some jaw dropping performance. I definitely want one of those. Watch to the very end: the last speed race is genius. :-)

Disclosure: this is marketing from Samsung. But I happen to think it's awesome, out of the box thinking from a company you don't usually think of as a savvy social marketer.