Free of XP and Vista! All Win7, all the time.

Buck Hodges

I took a couple of weeks off over the holidays (a ton of people did – there weren’t many folks around last week), and I finally took the time to migrate our two desktops at home from XP to Win7.  I’ve been running Win7 for many months on my work laptop, my personal laptop, and most recently a Dell Mini 9 (okay, I consider four months ago recently – heck, my blogging frequency is terrible now).

My regular laptop at home is an old Thinkpad T40 that’s about five years old at this point.  It has 1.5 GB of RAM (not that you need that much for 7 – 1 GB works fine for surfing, email, and that sort of thing), but it’s clearly a weak machine by current standards.  Win7 runs just fine on it.

Similarly, my old desktop was over five years old.  Since it has 1 GB of RAM, it runs Win7 very nicely, and that one’s now my wife’s machine.  Meanwhile, I finally bought myself a new desktop (Core i7 HP Pavillion Elite) back in November, and vacation afforded me the time to get all my stuff migrated over to it (after wiping the machine, of course – too much crud comes on new machines).

To finish moving to Win7, I needed to upgrade my development desktop at work from Windows Server 2008 to Windows Server 2008 R2 (aka Win7 server).  I hadn’t found the time to do it, but the video driver crashed again on Tuesday.  I was tired of that happening periodically.  So I made use of the Windows Deployment Service we have here in the local office, and kicked off a Win2k8 R2 installation as I left.

I spend so much of my day in Outlook these days that the first app I installed was Office (2010 Beta, of course, which works very well!).  I’ve been so busy that I haven’t even installed Visual Studio yet.  I had been running VS 2010 Beta 2, and that’s what I’m also running on my laptop.  I’m hoping to pick up a new signed build tomorrow, and put the latest and greatest on my dev box.

After redoing my dev box, XP and Vista (in the form of Windows Server 2008) are out of my life.  It’s hard to believe XP has dominated for basically a decade.  All of my installations of Win7 have been great, and I’ve only hit the one snag with a Bluetooth mouse I described in my post on the Dell Mini 9 (a reader commented not having the issue with the same combination, so maybe I did something dumb).  I really love how it finds all of the drivers for video cards, network adapters, smart card readers, and printers.  Win7 is awesome!

Happy New Year!

0 comments

Leave a comment

Feedback usabilla icon