Well...what a surprise!
I've been toying with the idea of installing Windows 7 Beta on my laptop for a few weeks now.
When I bought my laptop, it came pre-installed with Vista. Huge frustration followed as this not very high spec machine lurched and juddered trying to handle the bloatware beast that is Vista.
The picture above is the last time I tried to do a major upgrade of any of my software (in this case Potatoshop) without someone to hold my hand. It was a bad time.
Microsoft made Vista so easy to hate...so, not surprisingly almost everyone did (does)
It wasn't all that long before I'd ditched Vista and installed the altogether more spritely Ubuntu Linux distribution.
For basic surfing and stuff it was fine, but it didn't handle Flash content terribly well, and installing new applications that weren't part of the distribution was cumbersome.
In principle, I like Linux but the fact remains that unless you know what you're doing, it's harder to get things going on it. My days of wanting to be really geeky with my computers have long gone.
So - Win7 - why not? Microsoft typically get it right every-other major version.
I got it here
A couple of hiccoughs with the creation of a boot DVD (my bad, not Microsoft's) but it repartitioned and installed a clean new version in about 20mins.
I was initially disappointed that my laptop's widescreen monitor wasn't catered for, so the display was a bit blurry and the wrong aspect ratio...but after the first download of updates that's been miraculously fixed.
My pal suggests that I like aggravation in my life. He may be right...but it's possible, just possible Win7 will be less hassle than XUbuntu...
Watch this space.
I just noticed the blog link on the bottom of your email!
ReplyDeleteGood to see that win7 was relatively painless: I keep running up against memory limits with Photoshop (and Premiere and After Effects and Maya and...) and decided I should beef up my photo/video machine. Lots more memory, which needs a 64-bit version of Photoshop, which needs a 64-bit version of windows and I was thinking of giving win7 a try. There's a decent chance I'll come asking stupid questions when I do that...be warned!
Ooh, hello!
ReplyDeleteIt seems to be a week of me trying new stuff...blogging, twitter and Win7. I fear it may be too much change but what the hell.
I've got the 32-bit version for the lappy but if that's anything to go by then it's definitely worth a try - particularly if you don't think it's the end of the world if you have to go back to something else. It's why I thought I'd just go with the lappy for now.
I really have nothing to complain about (I know that seems strange) it installed neatly, the re-partitioning tool was way better than the old "DOS" type ones that Windows used to favour.
I haven't got any heavy-duty apps running on the machine but I might give something a go.
Definitely worth a try IMHO - and you;re talking to a big fan of XP and an abject hater of Vista...