Hi, I have one simple question : If I do exaxtly what lesson 1 says and my application compiles just fine (choosePixelFormat() works OK), do I get OpenGL hardware acceleration? I have read the relevant stuff in www.opengl.org and with glGetString(GL_VENDOR), I get something nvidia stuff, so I assume I have OpenGL acceleration but I want to make sure. I am not talking about extensions, just simple OpenGL acceleration. Thanks in advance.

Yes, if you did everything in lesson 1 then you have hardware acceleration.
And if you get nvidia or ati (depending a little on your graphics card) in the GL_VENDOR string then it's hardware accelerated, it is only when you get Microsoft as a vendor it turns to software, and that's bad.

But if you keep your drivers reasonably updated then that will never happen.