24 with 7

My last installation of windows XP finally had a nervous breakdown, so 24 hours ago I installed windows seven as a replacement for XP. This is on my main work machine so it has to be reliable, and most definitely gets a work out. So far my impression is that it's pretty much XP with more eye candy. The most annoying things so far are the way Microsoft decided to hide certain directories, the annoying click sound, and the way they hosed up the control panel. I also don't like that I cannot select small icons on the desktop.

I do like the fact that it seems Microsoft now allows users to select when they want to be nagged by reminder dialogs. Most dialogs now give you the option to turn them off. Some other geek must have gotten the opportunity I've been craving, and that is to walk through the Microsoft campus with a clue bat.

I'm giving the system a full run for its money, in fact I'm even writing this posting using windows seven speech recognition. Had a few glitches getting my system up and running. Several of my applications require the very newest version to install. I had to search for a few drivers - and one of my applications, a python based system administration application, initially installed fine but could not download its online updates. The updates would fail with an access permission error. After the initial install I got the annoying little window at the bottom right of the screen telling me I needed to do things like enable the windows firewall (yawn) and find virus protection software. It also mentioned I needed to reboot to clear permission errors. After the reboot the application was able to download and install its updates. Weird.

So far however windows seven seems to be living up to its hype. For the last 24 hours it's been stable, not one crash. Pretty good for a Microsoft product. For now anyway, I think I'll keep it for another 24.