Soooo many Windows….

OK, I know i have not posted too much lately, but all I can say is that it is out of pure lazyness.  I have not taken a whole lot of photos and my computers have been in a bit of an mess recently.

I have for the past years been managing all my photos, music and posts from my work computer, mainly since it is way newer and better than my 10 year old desktop at home.  I keep all of my data on an external HDD, and then run the management software on the laptop.  I used iTunes for music, Picasa for photos, and Firefox for browsing and blogging.

All this changed recently when the office decided to give me a nice new PC.   I was delighted to unexpectedly get a new laptop a couple of weeks ago, and due to the office’s “self serve” IT, i had to set the whole thing up on my own.  I am a reasonably technically proficient guy, so that is ok, but it was time consuming.   However, I only set up work applications on the work laptop, so I lost access to my music and photos, which put a slow down on the blog posts.

It also forced me to add yet another windows to my everyday use.  My work is currently using Vista as the official OS, something I had hoped to totally bypass.  So at the moment, I have XP on my home desktop, Vista on my work laptop and Windows 7 on my home laptop.  The home desktop is used almost exclusively by Claudia for teaching these days, but as the household tech support, I need to be on there pretty regularly.

I thought it would be a good moment to briefly reflect on all the windows I am using.

 

XP is the one that has been in front of me daily for quite a few years now.  I thought it was a pretty good system, but now after living in the new windows worlds, I can see how clunky and unfriendly many aspects of it were.  I still like that it is stable and I am used to it, but I have to say I dont really miss it now that I have moved on.

Windows Vista is the OS that I had taken great pains to avoid since its much maligned release.  I was pretty much against it from launch, for no good reason at all.  I just totally bought in to all the negative hype I read.  After using Vista for about a month professionally now, I have to say it was a lot of hub-bub about nothing. 

Maybe the initial release of Vista had driver issues and was slower and buggier, but as I recall, XP was so bad as to be almost unusable almost until the second service pack  dropped.  At this point, Vista runs quite fine and I think it is fast, better looking and adds quite some improved features over XP.  The search window on the start menu alone has changed the way I do things.

I have not yet added back iTunes and Picasa, but all of my work applications (office, SAP) run great and my non-work applications like firefox and photoshop also run great.  The Windows Live writer for blog posting is also pretty wonderful.  I do most of my posts (when I bother,)  in this program now and I really like it.

Windows 7 is of course the new big sexy and I had to get on board with that the day it dropped.  I run it on my home laptop, which is a slightly older, but not ancient one.  I really think it feels like Vista++ rather than a whole new OS.  It lost some of the things I disliked (the silly widget window) and added great things like the way you manage windows on the desktop.

My primary uses of the Windows 7 box are internet browsing (firefox again runs perfectly,) Light gaming (Warcraft, Torchlight, Team Fortress 2) and some video watching.    The OS handles all these applications great.

Now I need to decide where my music, photos and video needs to live… on my work PC or on my home laptop.  Ideally I will set up an HDD as a network drive (or maybe a NAS for Christmas if work gives a nice bonus.)   Once I get all my media set up to be accessed easily, I hope I will be able to motivate myself to write a few more blog entries.

Oh, and since we have another baby on the way (not sure who knows and who does not) that will no doubt provide a bunch more content for me both photos and stories.