I was able to get Windows 7 up and running last night. It actually wasn’t too rough of an install after a certain generous Microsoft benefactor sent the required parts to get my machine 7 operational.

It should be noted that Windows now gives a rating to describe your OS experience, on a scale from 1.0 to 7.9 (the 6 scale already being taken by ice skating judges and the 10 scale done to death by beauty pageants and/or video game magazines)(Will it expand to 8 with a future OS?).

My machine, with its new hardware, was ranked by Windows 7 at a very encouraging 1.0. Oh…7.9 was the good one. D’oh.

I don’t have Aero running, but the new look is still not lost on me. It is simpler, as advertised, and that’s what I love about Snow Leopard. Get me to what I want to do in the quickest way you can. 7 is definitely a jump in the positive direction from XP (which still had a lot of hold-overs from Windows 95 and 3.1).

Two things so far will take some getting used to:

I didn’t realize just how much I threw around my windows and project files until the windows started resizing on me. With 7, if you drag a window to the top of your monitor, the window maximizes. For the most part this is pretty cool. But when I got into the thick of a project last night I had windows inflating all over the place.

I read promises of pinning to the taskbar at the bottom, like the dock in OSX. You can pin applications, but you can’t pin folders (I probably haven’t discovered how to do it yet…I’ve only had one day with the system). I like to have my documents right there in the dock for one-click access. So far, no deal on the docs. I did put it in my Start menu.

Those two issues are not dealbreakers. They’re not intuitive, but I know I’ll adapt. (Isn’t that how tech works? You adapt instead of the software adapting.)

I already had back-ups of my documents, so I didn’t do the back-up procedure recommended by the upgrade manager. Like I told Devin, I felt like I was rolling up a new character who hadn’t wasted all his feats on stupid stuff like Mobility or Martial Arts I. I’ve set up a lot of computers since we first got this desktop. I now get to organize the files in a more logical sense, instead of trying to play catch-up.

What I didn’t realize was that Windows 7 still stored my documents, even though it said it wouldn’t. I’m not complaining. It’s in a folder called Windows.old. I wish I had known that before trying to set up my anti-virus. The program wouldn’t recognize my serial number – I had until February to renew, but I purchased a renewal last night. To download the free trial you still had to purchase it, they would credit back your account. Very tricky.

We set up the Office 2010 beta. I’m liking what they did. I mainly do web-based stuff, so I haven’t had to type anything up yet. My current book project is in Google Docs. I wanted to type it up in the new Word, just because it looked like so much fun. I know I’ll get there. I may even have to use Word’s help feature for the first time in my career, if only to see what it looks like. (I take that back…I had to use help to figure out mail merging for the office secretaries. It’s not like I merged a lot of databases to form letters in college. I didn’t major in Junk Mail (but I did minor in Spam)).

On day two I only have two complaints (appropriately enough).

7 has a great new search feature that is very similar to Spotlight in Snow Leopard. I’m not seeing easily how to search for files of certain sizes or specific file types (except for using wildcards with the file extensions). In XP you could hone down the criteria for your search even in the default search function. I’m not seeing it in 7 but I hope to find it in time. Now if I could only create Smart Folders…

My biggest complaint is what they’ve done with setting up a home network. If I had another machine running 7 I could set up a new thing called a homegroup (a little different definition than I’m used to). But I miss the My Network Connections section of the Control Panel. It was really easy to set up a network between the MacBook and my PC before. My first time trying it the router had the two machines sharing the same IP address, allowing neither to connect to the Internet or each other. My second time trying to set up a network disabled my LAN. I had to call up my ISP to figure out how to enable my network adapter again (basically I called but then went through the 7 troubleshooter a couple of times until I found the LAN settings…the poor tech support guy had to listen to me figure it out myself. He hadn’t used 7 yet.)

I’m finally able to share documents, but I still can’t get the printer on the network (even though it says it’s sharing). The home networking setup procedure is not intuitive any more.

Overall I’m very happy to be running Windows 7. I’m very excited about Office 2010 and how fast my computer is running. I also like that there’s now a decent screenshot utility built into Windows. For as many tech manuals as I’ve made, it’ll make my life easier.

I know this has probably circulated already, but at work I opened up my fortune cookie and found this:

The back said, “Please someone at work by being calm and impartial.” Easy for you to say, Courier Cookie. Your employer didn’t block Google. Thankfully it wasn’t every Google service (I’ve already used Wave to coordinate two major projects and Docs lets me write spontaneously). We’re now asked to use Bing as a campus if we’re looking for images. I like the image search, to some extent. What I find really funny, in a “the tighter you clench your fist the more systems will slip from your grasp”-type funny, is that YouTube is blocked completely on campus. I unfortunately had mentioned at the district office that blocking didn’t make sense because the results still came up in Google Video. Well, in Bing those YouTube videos still come up. Now it’s even easier because you hover over the thumbnail and it plays automatically.

I used to find that feature annoying but now it cracks me up. Bing, even though your name doesn’t conjugate well, you’re starting to grow on me.

I see this as a great opportunity to be a well-rounded computer user, to see both sides (until I become a famous author and can afford an iMac).

Semi-related posts:

1. Differences between Windows Vista and Mac OSX
2. Windows, the $100 laptop, and Hiasl
3. Happy Birthday, Interwebs!
4. 8 Bit Online
5. I’m a Wii bit obsessed