The other day I finally went ahead and upgraded my operating system from Windows Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 Home Premium. I’m not a huge fan of the Vista operating system and I was leery of Windows 7. About a month ago, one of my professors sent me an email about being able to upgrade to Windows 7 for $29.99. In order to get the upgrade a person needs to have a school email address, here is the link to the upgrade: Digital River.
A week ago, my co-worker called me and wanted me to set up her new computer she bought on Black Friday. I agreed to set the laptop up for her and got a look at Windows 7 and I really liked the look. Windows 7 has a very clean look to it and that’s what drew me in. I finally said hell with it and purchased the upgrade.
The whole process of downloading and upgrading Windows 7 took about 4 hours. One of my biggest concerns about upgrading was the possibility of losing my data and maybe some of the programs wouldn’t work. The upgrade went flawlessly, I didn’t lose any important documents, and all the programs seem to work fine. If you’re concerned about losing any documents just back them up.
When Windows 7 started, the chime was a sounded like something from the game Diablo. I thought that was cool. All of the security software worked but Windows Security Center alerted me about not having an antivirus installed but I run A-squared, which has a built in antivirus engine. Windows Vista never alerted me about not having an antivirus.
One of the new features I like about Windows 7 is the taskbar or Superbar. The old Windows taskbar was small and I didn’t care for it but the Superbar in Windows 7 is really nice. It’s easy to scroll to the open files and programs, when there is multiple browsers open it doesn’t take up as much space as before. When the items in the taskbar are highlighted and there is more than one instance, it will display all of them.
I mentioned earlier how clean I thought Windows 7 looked so I provided a screenshot of my desktop.
Screenshot of my desktop
The background is one of the default desktop backgrounds and can be accessed by right clicking on the desktop and scrolling to personalize. This area lets you customize the look of Windows 7 by changing the theme, background, screensaver, icons, and more. If the themes are not suitable, it’s easy to go online and download a new one.
I haven’t really messed around with any other settings yet but I’m digging Windows 7. My favorite OS from Microsoft was XP and I can see myself liking this OS better then XP. If anyone knows of any tweaks, I would definitely like to know them.
