Month: August 2009

All of the upgrades and reinstallation are done, and I now have a zippy essentially-new machine running Windows 7.

The most obvious change in 7 is in the taskbar. It uses large icons instead of a small icon and window title, all open windows of the same type are always consolidated into a single entry on the taskbar (previously it would only consolidate them once it started running out of room), and you can pin a running program to the taskbar in order to launch it again later. It’s basically a lot more like OS X’s Dock now.

The Explorer has also changed a bit. There’s no more ‘Explore’ option off the computer icon’s context menu, which is kind of annoying. And they’ve removed the tree view from the Explorer windows (but you can reenable it in the folder options), instead using the sidebar to emphasize a bunch of standard locations like your home directory, your music directory, network servers, etc. Which is also a lot like how Finder works…

Otherwise, things have gone fairly smoothly, and I haven’t really had any problems that I can attribute directly to Windows 7 itself. I still have to poke around and explore what else might be new, though.

With Windows 7 still downloading at the office, I decided to do the hardware upgrades tonight, even though I didn’t quite hit my goal of finishing King’s Bounty first.

It actually went a bit smoother than expected, with only two major hiccups. The first was when I went to install a new 120mm fan to improve airflow, when I suddenly realized that I didn’t know which direction it was supposed to face… Fortunately it’s the same style as a couple other fans in the system, so I was able to deduce the direction from that, and confirmed it with a sheet of paper. The second was getting the BIOS settings right, since this motherboard doesn’t seem to do a very good job of autodetecting all the right settings. It only took a little bit of fiddling to get it up to the proper 2.83GHz speed, though.

It’s practically an entirely new machine at this point, with a new CPU (Q9550 quad-core, replacing an E6600 dual-core), more memory (from 2 to 6GB), bigger drives (1.25TB total), and a new video card (Radeon 4870). It is actually missing something, though — I yanked out the Audigy 2 sound card I’d been using before. Creative’s support for newer OSes with older cards has been a bit lacking, so I’ll take a chance on the onboard sound for now.

Now I just have to put some OSes back on it…