Windows 7

Haven't managed to get round to doing any actual work yet this evening and am unlikely to at this time. Only (slightly) early start of the week - 10am but I always find it very difficult to concentrate at that time of the morning. I guess I've got used to just waking up at about 10 o'clock so anything earlier than that is out of the ordinary. This evening I have been avoiding work like the plague, so much so that I've actually switched on my PC (rather than my laptop) and used it for an extended period of time. Why didn't I do this sooner!? Up until now, it has been acting as a glorified external hard drive and the only thing I've been using it for is storing backups and large files. I got a copy of Windows 7 the other week thanks to the Microsoft partnership with the university but only got as far as installing it without using it for any length of time.

First impressions, I love it. I will admit that for some strange reason I am a big fan of Microsoft. It seems to be a rare things amongst computer scientists with most opting for Macs with the show-offs going for the Linux option. I think the reason I like Microsoft so much is because it looks nice. I know Macs are supposed to be the good looking ones but I just don't find the interface particularly easy to use and I don't really like the look of them either. I will admit that the Air grabbed my attention and I do like the brushed aluminium look but cannot stand the white, not to mention how easily they seem to get dirty.

One thing I still don't quite understand about windows is why they don't include some of the very basic tools that pretty much everyone needs to use their computers day to day. Adobe seem to have their name attached to a lot of them: Flash and Acrobat Reader are absolutely essential in my opinion and as far as I'm aware, there isn't really an alternative for Flash and I can't see why you would want to use anything other than Acrobat Reader when it is free. I also don't understand why they can't bundle the Windows Live Essentials programs with it either, if they are so essential, then why on earth do you have to go online and download them, it seems to be very counter intuitive.

On the plus notes, I have found it to be very quick to respond, it seems to have a reasonable start time although I'm used to the 10 minutes or so it takes to get my laptop up and running so anything on that is an improvement. I have noticed vast speed improvements when using office applications, on my laptop Outlook takes a good minute or so to boot up and sometimes three to shutdown (I have no idea why) but on here it seems to be pretty instant. One thing to note is that I do not as yet have any anti-virus installed due to a compatibility problem with the current one I have been provided with by the university. I've sent a tweet to the IT department this evening so hopefully I will have a reply by tomorrow, they always seem to be very helpful with things like this as I had a similar problem with Vista x64 last year.

Another unexpected nicety was that I didn't need a disc to install my printer, it had a very basic driver at first but without having to scour the Epson website it very efficiently prompted me to search online for an updated driver, found one and began to install it only requiring input to select my model number from a short list of about five or six. I have had problems using TweetDeck which has annoyed me slightly as I have started to depend on that for my constant source of information. The GUI seems to have been rearranged and some of the features are either missing or horribly unresponsive. It took me several attempts to convince it to add my Facebook account and it is currently missing the autocomplete @ list.

Other than the few problems I seem to have rather harshly highlighted, it hasn't even been officially released for goodness sakes! Typically a Microsoft OS only starts working after the fist service pack and I know many people who refused to even consider Vista before SP1 was released. So yes, overall I'm impressed and can see myself spending a lot more time on my nice PC rather than my slow old laptop. I could of course replace the slow old laptop but I've decided to wait until USB 3.0 is released so as not to feel foolish for missing out on the next big thing.