Today At PDC, Microsoft unveiled Microsoft® Codename “Max”. Max lets us list, organize, share the photos and turn them to slide shows.

Here is my quick install experience:

  • First, tried to install it on my Vista OS; but it nicely denied that it supports only XP with SP2
  • Now, moved to my XP box; and setup told me that it needs WinFX runtime components and will be installing one (Hmmm..I remember uninstalling this WinFX few days back to save some space)
  • The install started and took almost 5-7 minutes to complete (thats a long ?)
  • During the install process my IE (embedded with Avant browser) freezed out. Hmm..not sure whethere this is becuase of Max install; but am pretty much sure it should be becuase of the MAX install only.

    And surprisingly it did not even allowed me to take a print screen to share only the browser. So took the full screen print and you can see the browser freez from this screen shot.

  • After the installation is complete, still I can see that the IE is taking almost 90% of my CPU; and I need to kill IE and reboot the system
  • Now I started Max and it loaded after few seconds (took almost 30 secs to load). May be my CPU speed is not enough I assume or may be its becuase of first startup of MAX (some initializations..in case …hhh)
  • But after the program loaded amazed to see such a stylish UI. You will be thrilled. We should appreciate the work done by Max team as well the ground work provided by WinFX team.
  • Now, by default it picked the snaps from the “My Pictures” and I added rest of my pics from other directories and created a list and that was real fun to see all my pics in one place and the slideshow is aweful (Max is taking almost 30% CPU and PresentationFontCache.exe to some extent during the slideshow)
  • Overall, very nice program and I assume everyone likes this better than any of the earlier photo tools.

We have to wait and see what new wonders will be introduced to this MAX in coming days..

[Submitted by Randy]