A Turning Point
Nov. 4th, 2009 08:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
firebyrdI never thought I'd say this. I never thought it was possible. Oh, I had my hopes, but they were not so high as this. I knew it was a move I had to make at some point, but never did I think I would go forward without a single glance backwards.
I have installed Windows 7 and I love it.
I received my copy last week, having pre-ordered it months ago when Newegg had a half off sale. How could I pass that up, especially since when looking at the features, I really thought we needed to get Professional. However, I was still trying to figure out a backup setup, and so I opened it, stared longingly at it, and put it on a shelf. In the process of looking at hard drives prices and such, though, I came upon a sale on a GeForce 9400 video card with one gig of onboard memory. Between the sale and the mail-in rebate, the card was $30. While the gods of financial wisdom are no doubt plotting ways to smite me, I got it.
So, a couple of nights ago after the card had arrived, I braced myself for the annoyance of switching hardware around. My CPU is on top of one of the shelves of my desk (something I wish I'd thought of before I started taping boxes over the power and reset buttons to protect them from the ravages of Enoch), but that means that not only is there the normal hassle of unplugging everything, opening the case, wanting to cut my tongue out to remove the nasty crap they put in canned air to keep kids from huffing it, etc, etc, but there's heavy lifting involved. Still, shiny new graphics card, so I did it, and finally pulled my old faulty hard drive out of the freezer to see if I could get my stuff off of it. There was good and bad. When I wasn't having trouble, the card was very nice (to the point where whelp AoE in Ony 10 didn't lag it out). But then, entering Dalaran, I'd be getting 1 fps or less unless I turned everything down as far as possible.
Frustrated, I decided to start getting some backups done for the switch to 7. In the process, I finally remembered to check my old hard drive, to find it was accessible again, hurrah! This is a very good thing, as that hard drive has some irreplaceable things like my letters to and from Miriam, something very special to me as she stopped writing a year and a half ago for unknown reasons. I would have gotten stuff off somehow, but it's nice to not have had to pay anyone. As I was fiddling around, though, I checked my hardware properties...and found that XP was suddenly just recognizing one gig of RAM. When I checked in the BIOS, though, it was still showing all four gigs, which makes sense. Once properly installed, it would be mighty hard to bump RAM askew when putting in a new video card. I decided this was a likely culprit to my problems and, since the other hard drive was working again, backed some stuff up to both that and to a dvd, and got ready to install 7.
I've been a bit thrown by how many options and how much control they give you. Unaware of this at the start, I didn't manage to format my hard drive during my first installation, which ultimately caused problems as I ran out of space. Very little time was actually wasted, however, as I retained all the knowledge I gained playing around with settings and stuff. Every gripe I've come up with has been minor, other than the lack of formatting (and that was me, I found the option the second time around), and I've found out how to make the changes needed except for Zone Alarm not working. It thinks I'm trying to use Vista without SP1 and is refusing to install. Don't know what their problem is, 7's been out for like a week, but whatever. Hopefully all the rest of my security will suffice until they get things fixed as I haven't found a firewall I like as much as ZA.
7 is lovely, not just in looks, but in features. I love how the taskbar is done with snapshots so you can easily tell which window of a program you want to see (or, as now when I'm installing WoW, I can see where the progress bar is without having to open the window). I love the ease of throwing windows around in different areas in order to easily put them side by side, maximize, and the like. I love the varied options. I do like how pretty it looks. And much to my amazement, the help actually works! I was having trouble finding some specific menus for some settings I wanted to customize, and after some fruitless digging, reluctantly tried the help, and immediately found everything I needed. Maybe that was something they actually fixed in Vista, but since I've stayed far away from the ME clone, it was a very pleasant upgrade from XP's nearly useless search function.
Obviously I can't speak for the long term performance and compatibility with things at this point, but five hours in, I am happy. Is this the feeling that makes Mac users so giddy over their expensive-because-it's-trendy devices? I've never switched to any distributions of Linux due to compatibility issues with my programs, particularly games, but if Microsoft has actually gotten things right with 7, the temptation to dual boot I've fought at times is going to be gone entirely.
I have installed Windows 7 and I love it.
I received my copy last week, having pre-ordered it months ago when Newegg had a half off sale. How could I pass that up, especially since when looking at the features, I really thought we needed to get Professional. However, I was still trying to figure out a backup setup, and so I opened it, stared longingly at it, and put it on a shelf. In the process of looking at hard drives prices and such, though, I came upon a sale on a GeForce 9400 video card with one gig of onboard memory. Between the sale and the mail-in rebate, the card was $30. While the gods of financial wisdom are no doubt plotting ways to smite me, I got it.
So, a couple of nights ago after the card had arrived, I braced myself for the annoyance of switching hardware around. My CPU is on top of one of the shelves of my desk (something I wish I'd thought of before I started taping boxes over the power and reset buttons to protect them from the ravages of Enoch), but that means that not only is there the normal hassle of unplugging everything, opening the case, wanting to cut my tongue out to remove the nasty crap they put in canned air to keep kids from huffing it, etc, etc, but there's heavy lifting involved. Still, shiny new graphics card, so I did it, and finally pulled my old faulty hard drive out of the freezer to see if I could get my stuff off of it. There was good and bad. When I wasn't having trouble, the card was very nice (to the point where whelp AoE in Ony 10 didn't lag it out). But then, entering Dalaran, I'd be getting 1 fps or less unless I turned everything down as far as possible.
Frustrated, I decided to start getting some backups done for the switch to 7. In the process, I finally remembered to check my old hard drive, to find it was accessible again, hurrah! This is a very good thing, as that hard drive has some irreplaceable things like my letters to and from Miriam, something very special to me as she stopped writing a year and a half ago for unknown reasons. I would have gotten stuff off somehow, but it's nice to not have had to pay anyone. As I was fiddling around, though, I checked my hardware properties...and found that XP was suddenly just recognizing one gig of RAM. When I checked in the BIOS, though, it was still showing all four gigs, which makes sense. Once properly installed, it would be mighty hard to bump RAM askew when putting in a new video card. I decided this was a likely culprit to my problems and, since the other hard drive was working again, backed some stuff up to both that and to a dvd, and got ready to install 7.
I've been a bit thrown by how many options and how much control they give you. Unaware of this at the start, I didn't manage to format my hard drive during my first installation, which ultimately caused problems as I ran out of space. Very little time was actually wasted, however, as I retained all the knowledge I gained playing around with settings and stuff. Every gripe I've come up with has been minor, other than the lack of formatting (and that was me, I found the option the second time around), and I've found out how to make the changes needed except for Zone Alarm not working. It thinks I'm trying to use Vista without SP1 and is refusing to install. Don't know what their problem is, 7's been out for like a week, but whatever. Hopefully all the rest of my security will suffice until they get things fixed as I haven't found a firewall I like as much as ZA.
7 is lovely, not just in looks, but in features. I love how the taskbar is done with snapshots so you can easily tell which window of a program you want to see (or, as now when I'm installing WoW, I can see where the progress bar is without having to open the window). I love the ease of throwing windows around in different areas in order to easily put them side by side, maximize, and the like. I love the varied options. I do like how pretty it looks. And much to my amazement, the help actually works! I was having trouble finding some specific menus for some settings I wanted to customize, and after some fruitless digging, reluctantly tried the help, and immediately found everything I needed. Maybe that was something they actually fixed in Vista, but since I've stayed far away from the ME clone, it was a very pleasant upgrade from XP's nearly useless search function.
Obviously I can't speak for the long term performance and compatibility with things at this point, but five hours in, I am happy. Is this the feeling that makes Mac users so giddy over their expensive-because-it's-trendy devices? I've never switched to any distributions of Linux due to compatibility issues with my programs, particularly games, but if Microsoft has actually gotten things right with 7, the temptation to dual boot I've fought at times is going to be gone entirely.
