The Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) kicks off in Seattle this week. A number of people have asked me if I'll be attending and blogging like I did last year. Unfortunately, I won't be going this time because of other commitments.

It should be an interesting week, with Beta 2 builds of Windows Vista, Longhorn Server and Office 2007, all coming together.

Samsung is also expected to showcase working, pre-production models of their upcoming hybrid hard disks with 128 to 256MB NAND flash caches. They claim that the larger caches should be able to hold enough data so that the drives only need to spin once every 10 to 20 minutes. I hope we get to see a live demo of the actual performance during the keynote on Tuesday.