tiggymalvern | Thoughts about the new computer

I was supposed to be on a birdwatching trip east of the mountains today. It's snowing heavily for 50 miles through the pass and the wind is gusting at over 30mph where we were planning to go, so the birds will be hiding and the trip was cancelled. Of course, it wasn't cancelled until after I'd got up at 5.45am to make a 6.30 meeting spot. So I got back home at around the time I would normally be crawling out of bed, and it's looking like a long day!

See the cool neon blue glow! Wouldn't it look classy, if the case was blue, or maybe green?

Anyway, aside from the look, here is the experience so far.

1. Windows 7 is proving less annoying to learn than I had dreaded, because I've already learned how to find some basic functions while swearing at the TV computer over the last few months. It does still bug me that some previously easy to access features are now buried deep in the menu system.

2. Why did Win7 take away the little icon that reminds me to install new updates? Instead it daily tries to browbeat me into letting them all install automatically. No, because then you will restart automatically when I don't want you to, you little shit.

3. LOTR online looks so very pretty in the high graphics version. It should do, because it took 17 hours to download and install the whole thing from scratch, with all the updates. (This is partly our fault for simultaneously downloading it to both of our machines, but still...)

4. I now hate iTunes marginally less, as it was clever enough on installation to ask me where I had put the missing music files and locate them seamlessly. All except one, apparently. I still haven't figured out which the missing one is, and what the heck can have happened to it when everything else transferred. I still hate iTunes for forcing me to contaminate my computer with QuickTime.

5. Canon have apparently decided that my six year old scanner, which still works perfectly well, is obsolete, and they haven't bothered to create a Win7 driver for it. Manually installing old drivers using backward compatibility is a PITA, and at some point I will get around to doing it. Epson win here - my seven year old printer apparently still receives their support.

6. Firefox 4 does not seem to automatically restore my tabs when it restarts. I'm hoping there's an option somewhere for me to fix this, or I'll need a new filing system.

I also still need to install some software from disc, like photoshop. I have so very many software discs to look through....