Under the weather

SouthanUK General No Comments

Not feeling the best so I thought I’d thrash out a blog post.

 

Just been resting for the good part of 3 days now, I think its just a cold so hopefully I’ll be back at full strength in good time. In the meantime, here’s what I’ve been up to:

 

  • Watched a very good anime, Tokyo Magnitude 8.0. About a group of 3; brother, sister and some girl they meet along the way. A Wikipedia quote to make things more clear:

Tokyo_Magnitude_8.0_title

After a massive earthquake in Tokyo, siblings Mirai and YÅ«ki, who were visiting a robot exhibition in Odaiba at the beginning of their summer vacation, struggle to reach their parents in their house in Setagaya assisted by a female motorcycle courier named Mari, who is striving to reach her own daughter and mother in Sanjengaya. – Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 [Wikipedia]

 

  • Carrying on with my University course. Second semester is getting very interesting now. Becoming very involved, a cold doesn’t help when you’re trying to revise this stuff.

That’s all really, just gonna take it easy for the time being. Maybe even write a less whiney blog post too.

Windows 7, on my Laptop

SouthanUK General No Comments

Good news everyone! I have Windows 7 on my Lappy.

 

You may remember I wrote earlier that I received Windows 7 the day before it came out, thanks to Amazon’s fancy delivery department. The only thing putting me off actually installing the OS was that I lacked an external HDD. So for Christmas, that’s just what I purchased.

 

The HDD in question:

seagateHDD

Seagate Expansions 1TB External Desktop USB 2.0 Hard Drive

 

Quite the HDD indeed. With Backup and whatnot done on the old Vista installation, Windows 7 was duely loaded onto a freshly formatted hard drive.

 

I must say, the 15 minute install was very impressive. I did have a few problems however:

  • Native drivers didn’t recognise my wireless network, fixed by installing Dell’s drivers
  • Touchpad was a bit erratic at times, fixed by installing necessary drivers
  • McAfee refuses to install on it, my fault however, I seem to have used it on too many computers 😛

Other than that, the install was pretty painless.

 

Final thoughts: Windows 7 is indeed quite the improvement on the bloated monster that was Vista. Improvements in power management means I was able to squeeze another 30 minutes out of the battery, which is very surprising due to the battery coming up for 2 years in age. The only thing that is irking me slightly is the taskbar. The taskbar, when it gets full, groups by application, which can be a pain to navigate. I know this can be turned off but the option “Never Combine” just doesn’t cut the mustard. Also the time taken for Aero Peek to work is, by default, a tad too long. A simple registry change fixes this and makes the operating system, graphically, a bit more snappy. All in all, a great operating system indeed.