Xatal

I apologize for the lack of posts, I’ve been rather busy these past few days. One of my big projects was upgrading to Windows 7 Professional Edition.

Upgrading an operating system or switching computers is never a quick task, and moving over gigabytes of music, movies, and games, organizing partitions, and mass-installing programs always makes for a long day.

But I’m loving Windows 7! Here’s what I’ve noticed:

The new taskbar.

The most noticeable difference from Vista, the new taskbar allows you to collapse open windows into just titles and group them together. Personally I like spreading my icons out throughout the taskbar (that’s what it’s there for!), so I have my taskbar set to be somewhat of a hybrid between Vista and the new design.

It’s fast!

Vista used to take me about 3 minutes to start up fully — the first 90 seconds brought me to the login screen, the next 90 seconds were spent initializing the desktop. Windows 7 starts up fully in about half that time, and shuts down even faster.

Aero runs great.

Aero, the glassy and modern interface of Vista, lagged a little for me on Vista, but on Windows 7 it’s completely fluid and feels very intuitive. Even if you choose to have Aero disabled, the Windows 7 Basic theme still looks pretty appealing in its own right.

The show desktop button is crucial.

I always used to hit Windows + D to go straight to the desktop, but having a small icon at the right side of the taskbar is even better. With a quick click, everything minimizes.