At about 8:00 PM earlier this evening, after getting home and having dinner I headed up to my desk and XP machine, drew a deep breath and peeled back the shrink wrap from the newly purchased Window 7 box.
I've been running XP since before its release while I worked at Adobe and was fortunate enough to have been part of the beta. I still have that copy. It was free for beta testers ... at least for us.
I habitually re-install XP every six to nine months. Clean install. I'd format the hard drive with Knoppix and start from scratch. At least for the first few years I did. Over the last couple of years I'd just drop the disk in and let it do its thing. Then spend a couple of days installing drivers and software. Screaming at the thing and scaring my wife and the cat, so I was not looking forward to another sleepless night and being up until 3:00 in the morning and sucking down coffee while watching software install for what was left of my weekend.
Just to be on the safe side I ran the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor, an executable file from Microsoft that'll check your computer and let you know if it'll run Windows 7.
It had been over six months since the last clean install and while I'm not a fan of early adoptions of any software I was looking for a little chaos in my life. Things had gotten too quiet around here, so why not? I had skipped the entire Vista fiasco by opting for caution a couple of years ago. I popped in the disk ... the 64-bit disk and started the "upgrade" from XP.
As soon as the install started it hit me. I'd forgotten to back up my fonts (I have tons and I'm a font whore) and had completely forgotten about the drivers - a rookie mistake. I booted up my wife's rig and started downloading chip set and graphic drivers while Windows 7 (64-bit installed behind me).
In about an hour it was done. I heard the singing of angels and gazed upon what Microsoft had finally done right.
My screen resolution was perfect, on both monitors. Internet Explorer found the Internet and I downloaded Firefox, my printer, scanner, mouse, Mac Keyboard. Everything worked. The TV adapter was immediately recognized and the nVidia card driver installed - amazing.
My eyes glazed over while I poked around and looked through the different areas. The new task bar, some new features, Control Panel ... and Libraries??? Interesting.
