entirely too many words regarding windows 7

so, due to a desktop computer issue that somehow inexplicably also spread to my laptop this past weekend, i was put in the precarious position of having to juggle about 400 gb of personal files and data between three hard drives while needing to reformat them all (a difficult proposition considering the goal was to not reformat a hard drive at any time that still had said data on it). well, long story short what ended up happening was that i tried first to roll back my laptop from factory-installed vista to xp. didn't work, for obvious reasons, but then it didn't work for not-so obvious reasons. i reformatted the entire hard drive, etc., only to find that xp still wouldn't install correctly. turns out that because my laptop (specifically the hard drive) runs on a SATA interface and the only drivers native to the xp installation disk for such things are old-school RAID and IDE drivers...shit blew up. also, because during the install process, xp rewrites the boot sector before realizing that it doesn't have the right drivers to interface with the hard drive, there was literally no way to get the system to boot back up even to boot from a recovery disc. so i had to hook the hard drive into my other computer, boot off a second drive, and from that drive reformat the other hard drive. lots of xp and vista juggling later, i realized there was really no way to either dual-boot vista/xp or single-boot xp from my laptop. my dream of running 2 xp systems was dead in the water, along with most of my hard drives.

side note: in case you were wondering, i got these OSs from myWSU's website...where you can legally download free copies of all kinds of awesome MS and other software as well as various OSs, such as xp with all variety of service packs and in 64 or 32 bit, as well as vista business, etc.

it turns out that in reality i could have finagled a way (supposedly) to run xp on my sATA machine, whether in single or dual boot, but the whole goddamn thing just seemed too rickety and unstable, and xp's driver-finding software is a piece of shit on the best of days.

fortunately, deliverance came in the semi-ridiculous fact that for some reason myWSU had a legal, working, full copy of windows 7 professional available for free download, a whole 2 months before it is even supposed to be released for retail. i still haven't really figured out why this was the case, but i went ahead and downloaded it, both 32-bit (for my desktop) and 64 (for my laptop). i installed it, and presto...most of my problems (except the problem of how to move 100s of gbs of files around) were immediately solved. i solved the parenthesized problem by deleted about 150 gbs of my files that i realized i was really just holding onto the way that your mom holds on your grade school projects still.

so, the point of the cumbersome and pointless narration above is simply that i've been running windows 7 for about 10 days now, which puts me in a position that relatively few people are currently in.

which is why things like this make me angry.

not so much the article itself, though for a wired article it is pretty uninformative and fluffy. what annoys me is the comments, and the comments that i've seen at the end of many similar articles lately.

the windows 7 naysayers, as i see it, have 2 major, nonarguable flaws in their argument(s):

1. the vast majority of them haven't actually used windows 7 yet. using the RC or the beta doesn't count; i've used both, and the real thing, and i can say with some authority that the real thing is a lot more solid that either prerelease.

2. you can't hold on to xp forever.

it's funny, because i think at least one of the points given in the wired article is very important. windows 7 was built largely on the suggestions of its proposed buyer base. windows OSs have been booed for what seems like ages...i remember when win98 came out and people couldn't stop talking shit about it. yet vista, i think, was the first windows OS that people not only disliked, but disliked enough to stop buying it. reasonably enough, this seemed to get MS's attention. so for 7, they actually listened directly to what people hated and worked on changing it.

yes, to be honest, i think 200 bucks is quite a bit to expect people who already have vista to pay for 7, considering what you get. but microsoft has never been one for reasonable prices (hundreds of dollars for MS Office, when all but the most particular users can get the same functionality for free in openoffice?), and let's face it: a lot of people are just going to download pirated copies anyway. it's already happened, apparently, even before my copy went up for download on myWSU.

but...this update, new OS, whatever, is meant to fix the downfalls of vista. sure, it doesn't fix them all, and as some of the commenters point out, it doesn't fix exactly what everyone wants (welcome to life past the age of 10, you greedy little bastards), but it's good. remember, xp was supposed to be an upgrade from ME. that seemed to work out alright.

the thing that aggravates me the most, i think, is the "we didn't ask for windows 7, we just asked for more support for xp" complaint i've heard a lot. that just makes no fucking sense. sure, i'd love to live in a world where MS was working on xp SP4 and where rabbits shit rainbows and puppies shit other puppies. but it just doesn't make any sense. i realize pointing out that internet commenters are idiots (and doing so on my own blog, no less) is about as productive taking a nap during the GRE, but i just don't get this. i really, really like xp too. i started using it right when it came out and have had it on at least one of my computers (usually at least the one i play games on) since then. i definitely consider vista a downgrade in a lot of ways. i would like, in theory, to just keep using it forever. but things just don't work that way. the reality is that MS straight-up has to keep upgrading their OS to stay relevant, they have to upgrade that OS's ability to handle things like multiprocessors and 200 gbs of RAM, because eventually those things are going to be things you see on every single home computer out there. at some point, xp's ability to interface with computers will become irrelevant, just like having a 2400 baud modem or 4mb of RAM of a 16mb hard drive all eventually became irrelevant.

at this stage, there seems to be this confused mass of people who, despite their constant, enraged and semi-uninformed bitching about MS (which probably didn't start when 7 came out, it probably started when they first got on the internet) for some reason feel like their only real option for an OS is MS's OSs. this is my first brain-melt moment. if everything this company does sucks so much, why don't you just upgrade to linux? or mac? there are a lot of good cheap/free versions of linux out there. mac is also a lot cheaper and a lot of people like snow leopard, so it can't be that bad. why didn't you switch years ago? do people just like to complain?

my second brain-melt moment is this: if you're going to stick with MS for now, upgrade to windows 7. staying with vista is okay, if you like it and can live with it. but if you have xp, please switch. why? because, if you're planning on staying with MS anyway, the next OS they come out with will likely not be out for 4-5 more years, which means around 2013 or so, which means by the time you get another chance to upgrade to something else, you'll have had xp on your computer for at least 10 years...which is equivalent to still having had windows 3.1 on your computer around the year 2000. yes, that's fucking absurd, and yes i think it's a pretty fitting analogy. i didn't upgrade because 7 is the be-all-end-all of operating systems. i upgraded because i want to stay with MS as my primary OS for a number of reasons and this is a solid upgrade. 7 isn't going to revolutionize the universe or anything, but, fortunately, it's good.

first things first: unlike vista, i was able to load it on my five-year-old desktop computer, which has a 3ghz single processor and 1gb of RAM, and it runs fine; in fact, it runs just as fast or faster than xp, save for a few slowdowns due to running aero effects now and then. the computer is exactly as it was when i bought it in 2004, except i've installed a second hard drive (the one from my old, fried laptop), a new DVDRW drive, a new power supply and cooling fan, and an nvidia 6200 graphics card to replace the old intel integrated extreme graphics. it boots up quite literally in seconds (instead of minutes, as with xp or vista). my laptop also boots up faster now as well. both machines run aero effects just fine, and aero itself is a lot more understated and effective then it was in vista (i.e. it actually works on your computer and lets you do neat things when manipulating windows and multi-tasking, rather than just looking cool and slowing shit down like it did in vista.

a lot of the other vista-things work a lot better in 7, such as the new start menu. driver finding was a snap...sure, it's not really that big of a deal to go and download the drivers you want from the internet, but why bother when you can tell 7 what devices you need drivers for and it goes and gets them? and if you want to get them yourself (for example, if you want to roll back your nvidia drivers), just tell 7 not to get them for you and it won't. basically, you can disable everything that made vista annoying if you so choose. 7 recognized AVG as a viable virus program, so no more warnings from windows security center everytime i start up. the only thing that 7 didn't automatically find and install for me upon startup (remember, one of my computers is five years old, the other is almost brand new) was the specific mousepad driver for my laptop...so the mousepad still worked, but i had to go to the hp site and download the specific synaptics driver before the mouse wheel functionality would work. big deal.

overall i'm really really impressed with 7, after having used vista for 2 1/2 years on various laptops and having mostly hated it. there's alot of streamlining that has gone on, both upfront and behind the scenes, obviously. if you want to avoid MS OSs, grab ubuntu or snow leopard or something else; that's fine...not everybody eats the same cereal for breakfast either. but don't cling to xp now that MS is giving you an alternative that is decently fast and easy and fun to use and will allow to run a computer made post-2005 to its fullest potential. i'll be the first to admit that there are a lot of things not to like about a lot of MS products (my most-run programs on my computer are winamp, openoffice and firefox/chrome), but 7 ain't bad. i miss xp's heyday too, especially when i'm trying to run legacy PC games and compatibility mode doesn't cut it, but hey, that's why 7 can effectively and efficiently emulate an xp environment within it, so you can still run whatever you want in xp (not in xp compatibility mode, but in an emulated version of the OS itself). at some point we all have to put down our binky and realize that being 20 or 30 might not be as fun as being 10, but time only moves in one direction. well, at least until they invent windows delorian edition. and even when they do, i'm sure there will be commenters who whine: "why the hell did they build their time machine out of a delorian?! a camaro would make so much more sense! waaaaaah!"

i don't know what i'm talking about anymore.