I love to try out new things (cuisines, books, articles, movies etc) and in other aspects I am inertia personified. There are certain things that I do not want to change. I do not mind living in oblivion of existence of those changes.
Technology is one such piece -- I still use a cell phone which I bought in 2005. According to S, the museums are going to bid for it soon because it is an antique piece which even Cavemen will refuse to use. Until a few years ago, I thought that Blackberry is just a company that makes amazing trousers. (Try those trousers in Lifestyle in Bangalore, you wont regret). I am very possessive about Windows and am not ready to move on to iMac. And from the days of Netscape Navigator, I was a staunch follower of IE.
On the other hand, S is pretty open to change. She toggles between Firefox, IE and Chrome just like switching between popcorn and soda during an movie. She is already bored with her smart phone and wants to try out Android now. And she has plans to gift me a Macbook (that she has craved for last 1 year) for my birthday.
Things are changing now though. I am switching over to a real Blackberry now. I love the Chrome browser and have dropped IE as my primary browser for good.
In the midst of this mini-tech revolution in my life, my laptop started acting really weird. It was running on Vista and I hated it. It was just so annoying, to say the least, and I was waiting for an opportunity to switch back to the old school XP.
Fortunately for me, my laptop did not recognize the XP bootable CD in my collection and it got so angry with the other XP bootable that I borrowed from Me2 that the OS crashed for good.
So, another friend of mine graciously offered me a Vista Ultimate and Windows7 Ultimate CD from his CD library. For once, going back a few years was not an option. So, I decided to take the leap forward. What the heck? Vista sucks so bad, so Windows7 can not be any worse. Taking the nothing-to-lose approach, I installed Windows 7.
And what a pleasant surprise it was!!!
The installation was done in about 30 minutes. Customization was very easy. And other than finding a valid antivirus program, I had everything working in about an hour -- with all installations done.
Everything looks good -- in fact, it looks great -- on the new OS. Some annoying features from XP and a lot of thorns from Vista have been dropped. The new features function better, faster and most importantly, there are no irritating popup messages.
For the layman -- I love the Chess game here, primarily because there are no hints and I have to rack my brain. The desktop changes its wallpapers on its own every few minutes and you can customize the pictures you want to see as your wallpaper. A lot of the options and features are customizable and very flexible.
From a techy angle, the only drawback I see is that it occupies too much space on the hard disk. But hey, HDD are so cheap nowadays, just grab an addon and you are good to go. So far, have not found any software incompatibility issues and drivers are easy to find. There are clear instructions if you want to upgrade from XP to Windows 7 without having to format the system.
As I play around more and more, I am sure there will be some flaws unearthed, but well begun is half done. Microsoft, for a change, has launched a very good product and made inert people like me embrace a big change. They are even giving the Home version to students for just $10 and about $25 to select organizations for a trial period of 6 months.
I have been working on XP for almost 6 years now and was very cozy on XP. But I do not feel out of place with Windows 7 and for that matter, I am liking it.
Now waiting for my workplace to switch over to Windows 7 as well ;-)
For my 4 readers, give it a shot. You will not regret it, even if you are old school like me.
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