Windows 7

Ok well here it goes for the first real blog post. Lets start it off with a bang and go right into Windows 7. First off it was released 22nd of October 2009. If you were a lucky soul who had a university email lying around then you got it for $30, if not then well I don't want to think about it. First off W7 promised a lot about there handy new Os, that was supposedly supposed to be a rewrite. First thing, this is no rewrite. This is what Winblows Vista should have been. W7 is the apology. The kind of apology a 3 year old is forced to do while they're looking at their feet. W7 is like service pack 3 for vista. It fixes a lot of the problems of vista and adds a few more. If the deity Xp and the leg dragging vista had a child W7 would be the little hunchback Hercules. Right off the bat W7 impresses you with its vague reminder of vistas little clock and sticky pad, along with the tel tale windows bar along the bottom. The difference is that w7 calls them Gadgets and allows you to drag them all over the place in a widget / Kubuntu (membrane? no ... morphing ?... no) manner , what ever I regress, in more way than one. The gadgets are just like widgets and are quite addicting, believe me , I can tell you how many clocks I have,plus I looked at every ...EVERY gadget on the site. I currently settled with a bar-code clock , and advanced cpu/ram monitor, wireless network monitor and a wired network monitor, a battery meter, and an advanced sound control unit. I still keep Task Manager up none the less. This is all on my 2nd monitor btw. I couldn't see anyone actually keeping all this on their primary,but im sure there are.

Now on to the Task bar / tray ... whatever you want to call it. at first I wasn't sure about it, but now after further inspection, I love it. The small icons are helpful and neat... along with the mouse over ability to swap between windows in the same program without actually minimizing anything. It is like an Alt + Tab for each program individually. Also it can display just what you are looking at and make the rest opaque. Only qualm I have is I liked the vista alt tab and mouse-over that showed the window in current mode, ie: video was running and mouse-over you could see a smaller version. In W7 On mouse-over it is a screen shot from the last time it was open. It saves system resources this way ... but it was one of the only convenient things about vista, though They make up for it with the elastic maximize of the mouse-over.
There is also a mouse-over / button to the far right of the tray that on mouse-over shows your desktop and on click minimizes open windows. The tray itself is fairly the same. The control panel is now permanently a mix between classic view and non classic annoyance. Im not sure if I like it yet.

I just installed, well i should say upgraded to it today. I was going to clean install but I was curious and impatient.

First thing about the negative side of W7 , compatibility, or lack there of. Luckily only 2 programs had to be reinstalled. My Hamachi needed an upgrade along with damien tools. The rest of the programs are still "Working"
Anarchy Online an 8 year old free MMO I play
(much more content then WoW) ... and im not dis-ing wow by any-means
<------ Lvl 80 Lock , Lvl 80 Priest --|

but AO had to be given exceptions through the firewall, thats normal, Then I had to find this wierd thing that looked like regedit meets an sql manager and add a gui to it, i dont know what it was but there were more exceptions in there as well that I had to enable. Then after that it was loading to a big black screen. It did not like duel monitors anymore for some reason. I had to surf through settings until i had the proper graphics card paired to the game. (W7 however loves twin monitors, much nicer setup. Yay!... still not great, but better.) Ok also Cod4 now freaks out and dose not stretch games resolution to full screen anymore. In fact no game does anymore, which is aggravating when your laptop is meant to handle 1280 by 800 and your monitor is 1900 by 1200. It works fine if you play it at
< 19x12 but alas now you cant. Unless you want a black border around your game. Tis annoying. Also The resource allocation is not impressing me. It was supposed to be amazingly more efficient. I am idling at something like 5% less cpu and ram, thats nothing , I was expecting to having my idle cut almost by half, even 25% would have been a great. Sadly not though. The tray icons also freak out alot, I have been told since i booted that im not connected to a network but im on the internet... and a network for that matter. Also It constantly tells me to activate AVG but it never activates it wen i tell it to, or rather tell windows to tell it. Aside from that I would have to say it is semi stable and I cant wait for the next patch to fix the small bugs.

All in all good buy if you are can get it for the $30 - $50 from using a school account, or if you get a free upgrade. It is saying something when a Beta and first release of an OS is better than a previous on Service pack 2.
It is saying...
"This is what vista should have been, and we are sorry so we tried this time"
Windows 7 is worth it, just wait till the next patch and the slight annoyances will cease to exist.

:)>-