The setup - I am currently on the front porch, it is slightly overcast and upper 50's. I'm listening to
Pandora's New Age Ambient Station with the wind chimes and birds embellishing the tunes in a pleasant way, and smoking (I picked it back up after the work situation got tense and I need to have my tail kicked for doing it) and thinking about Windows 7 Starter.
I have made no secret of the fact that Windows 95 was my favorite OS. I know it had it's problems, but it was a fast, minimal OS that let YOU build it from the ground up. You could still remove IE 3 if you wanted. It fit in 80 Megs or less, and it was plenty fast enough for what I did with it. No USB, no WIFI, so now it can't do what I need of it.
I started playing with Windows 7 Beta awhile back - in fact it was one of the things that zorched my previous laptop. Windows 7 didn't - but I thought the "burn your own backup discs" utility my Acer Aspire had would protect me and get me back to first boot (stalled on disc 2 of 9). This was the full "Pro" version, and I liked it about as much as any other OS on M$'s offerings. The UAC wasn't quite as annoying as Vista (in Vista I just disabled it - yeah, I clicked the program and I don't need to tell you three times I want to run it). It seemed a bit faster. It would run most of my old software. And then my laptop was overheating - not Windows 7's fault - the Aspire I had had hardware issues that were overcome with software that was Vista specific. The laptop would freeze and I just put it up.
So, I kinda knew a bit about Windows 7 coming in, but the four (I think there are four) different versions and saw the Netbook came with Starter, the lowest, I was kinda into it. Lean and mean - I always kill most of the fluff visuals and the like and cut my screen resolution down to less than 32 million colors to conserve memory. BUT - no desktop wallpaper? How was I going to live without my Buffy, or the awesome Red Planetscape wallpaper I had adorned my desktops with for ages? I got over it. I don't look at the desktop for long, and the subdued Windows 7 logo at least looks ok with the Taskbar on the bottom.
So how does it run? Fast. I had to uninstall a bit of crapware, kill the Office trial, and install my programs, but I am kinda liking. I am using Windows Security Essentials for virus scan (they talked about it on Lifehacker), CCleaner, Firefox, Open Office (might have to get some Office - they use it at work and some of the State Forms do not come out pretty in OO.org), iTunes (tried not to, but it is still the best music program out there - to me), and Irfan View. Need to load up my Photoshop Lite (boy gave it to me after he Mac'd up), but using nothing but the touchpad, I don't see myself editing photos much (he uses a Wacom Tablet input device that I never could get the hang of).
So how am I feeling? Boots fast, is stable, lite, and with the Asus hotkey commands and touchpad embellishments, VERY usable for what I do. I like. Too bad the SD card slot is not bootable - got a free 4 gig SD card with my 2 gig memory upgrade and it would have been SOOOO cool to load a netbook remix onto it and roll from it. But I don't feel I have to... Windows 7 Starter, so far, is doing me just fine.
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