Friday, October 30, 2009

Vista no more!

I am now officially Vista-free! Sadly I had to completely reinstall Windows 7 in order to combine both partitions, but everything's put back together now and all that's left is to finish reinstalling all my programs.

Also: Virtual XP machine integrated into Windows 7. How cool is that?

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Windows 7

Been a while since I've posted here so I figure I may as well make up for lost time.

I've started using Windows 7. It is beautiful. Now maybe my expectations have been so reduced by the steaming pile of shit that is Vista that anything looks good to me now, but that said, 7 is still a huge improvement over Vista. It's faster, uses a full third less memory, and in general works better. It's taken a while to get used to the fact that I can no longer use my beloved Classic Start Menu, but the new one is, if not an improvement, than at least more than usable.

Speaking of improvements, the Libraries feature is long overdue. Being able to set a folder as a library, and then have a permanent link to said folder regardless of where I move it, is a wonderful thing.

The only problem I've had so far is having to reinstall drivers for a lot of my hardware; 7 doesn't seem to support a lot of older stuff out of the box, and it can be a pain to have to manually set everything up. This was less of a problem in Vista, though to be fair, most of my peripheral hardware is 5+ years old. On the bright side, 7 seems to support a lot of the old Vista drivers, so if there isn't an extant Windows 7 driver for a piece of hardware, chances are the Vista driver will work.

I'll post more as it comes to me, but so far upgrading to Windows 7 seems to be a good choice.