So, thunderstorm…..lightning….UPS seemingly not working as computer blows up.
Nip round the computer shop, 450 euros later, Compaq box and new UPS.
Use IE to get Firefox, then AVG, Open Office, Skype, OK, back to work.
Missing a few bookmarks for things I\’d intended to do but just about everything important is online in GMail.
OK…..but just wanted to mention that Windows 7 doesn\’t seem to be, uniquely for a new Microsoft operating system, entirely shite.
Perhaps the reason for this is that, umm, as above, I don\’t really rely on it very much? Microsoft, that is?
Ummm… You’d soon notice it if you didn’t have an operating system.
I use Google for just about everything these days, including Chrome rather than Firefox, which is handy in that everything is in the cloud but does mean that Google know a hell of lot about me.
For bookmarks, I recommend Xmarks (was Foxmarks), I’ve now had the same bookmark file transferred through about 5 machines.
Unfortunately, I’ve neve rgot around to tidying them out, so there’s still bookmarks to blogposts written in 2006 that I meant to respond to and never did…
And yes, Windows7 is quite good (I’m running the neutered Starter edition which is adequate for my needs, similar to yours), possibly because, unlike previous releases, they had it running in beta at head office pretty much everywhere for two years.
Still thinking of installing Ubuntu into a different partition though.
Windows 7 is based on Vista’s codebase, but has been optimised and improved.
Microsoft OSs are like Star Trek films; they alternate between being mediocre and terrible.
What always strikes me is, given identical hardware, how sluggishly Windows runs compared to MacOS and (especially) Linux. Windows 7 is an improvement, but Vista was just shockingly bad. And Microsoft have never worked out how to do window management in a document-centric style. It’s clumsy and awkward. Both the application-centric approach of MacOS and the free-form paradigm of window managers under X are much better.
“Still thinking of installing Ubuntu into a different partition though.”
I did too. Scary at first. But after a while, I reduced the size of the Vista partition to zero bytes. Everything much better now.
I can recommend Dropbox as a superb online filestore.