Arrested Development - Ex-Pats Mexico

Thanks Rex ... that looks like something I used to use over 10 years ago before MS included one

I agree MS needs simpler versions of their OS's for business environments and for people that know what they want. In the early 90's we upgraded the whole City of Bellevue WA from terminals to WIN 3.11. What an education process that was. All these people wanted to do was get some work done .... until they found solitaire. Bells and whistles have been selling but users are more sophisticated these days

I had to buy a new computer last March when I was in California, it was because I had a pressing need to have an operating computer. I had taken one of my two dead Dell laptops with me to be repaired and I didn't want to pay an import tax for carrying two laptops into The US. A shop in Texas said they could repair it, but it would have been too time consuming to send it to Texas, wait for the repairs to be done, and then wait for it to be shipped back to me in California.

One of my son-in-laws owns a computer service shop in Napa, he took it to a larger shop in Oakland, and they couldn't repair it, so I bought a new Compaq laptop with a 15.6 inch display, a numeric keypad on the keyboard, a 2 GB dual core processor, and 2 GB of RAM at the Best Buy store in Fairfield for only $460 Dollars. I intend to upgrade the amount of RAM, this darn thing uses 45 to 50% of the RAM at idle, when the computer is doing no work. That is about 1 Gig of RAM just to run. Unfortunately, Vista is the only OS available at most retail stores right now. I left my old Dell at my daughters house in Napa to avoid paying an import tax on a second, dead, laptop here.

I have been slowly but steadily tweaking it for the last six months by deleting all the crapware, programs, and trial versions of programs that I know I will never use, etc. I never play games on a computer, and I got the biggest, most dramatic increase in speed when I deleted a bunch of H-P games, I didn't count them, but there must have been 25 or 30 of them. That's crapware for me.

When I got this computer, it used to take 10 minutes or more to start up or shut down, and it always took one or two minutes for any web page to open. Now it starts up or shuts down in about three minutes, and web pages open instantly. It is beginning to resemble a computer. I do love the numeric keypad. It is still slower than XP, but I can live with it until December 9th. I ordered a pre-release upgrade disk for Windows 7 for $50 Dollars and it won't be delivered until then I missed the free beta download of the W 7 OS by one day. A Dollar short and a day late as usual.

The difference between an upgrade disk and a OEM OS disk is that an upgrade disk usually preserves everything in your computer and just changes the OS. To use a OEM disk, you must format the hard drive and then load the new OS, you lose everything in your computer and then need to reload all of your extra programs, documents, address book, etc.

I used an OEM disk when I upgraded from W98 to W2000. It was a pain in the grommet, but worth it. When I went from W2000 to XP, I found that they are almost identical. XP is based on W2000 and it has a few useful tweaks but nothing earth shaking.

Bill Gates is reported to be retiring soon, and the only thing I can think of is that he wasn't monitoring the idiots that were developing Vista very well. He is the one ultimately responsible for this disaster though. With all the hype while Vista was being developed, I don't recall a pre-release beta version being released to get any user feedback.

So many things have been either deleted, moved, and renamed, that it takes a few days just to find many things. It is a ridiculous OS.

Rex

There was also a B/W version called Win286 that would run on a floppy. This new windows meant getting a graphic card monitor and a mouse

After using the Auslogistics defragmenter for a week, I did some configuration this morning. If you open the program, you can click on the settings button on the top of the page and enable auto defragmentation daily, weekly, or monthly. There are some default settings which you may change to the times you believe your computer will be running, etc. and to pause defragmenting when disk usage reaches a certain percentage. That will probably be a useful feature for older computers with slower processors.

I will run the program manually once in a while to check my disks and try to determine if the auto defragmentation is doing a good job, if is is, it will be one less thing that I will need to remember to do.

Rex

Is the following not true?



http://support.microsoft.com/kb/942092

Arbon, download the Windows 7 upgrade advisor beta. It is a small download and when you run it, it will produce a report about the computer it was run in, it will tell you which version of W 7 is compatible with the computer etc. there are usually some upgrades that need to be done, and some programs may need to be un-installed and reinstalled after Windows 7 is loaded.

Some versions of XP being upgraded to W 7 require a clean install and you are advised to save everything because you will lose everything when doing a clean install. It will also tell you if you have enough RAM and if your printer is compatible with Vista, etc.

I'm sorry I can't give you a URL for it, I didn't save it and I found it doing a Google search. I am not going to load W 7 in my three year old Gateway laptop running XP, it has 1 GB of RAM, that is the maximum it will support. The W 7 advisor says it will support W 7, but my new Compaq Vista laptop has 2 GB of RAM, and it is using 45 to 50% of the RAM when it is doing no work. That means that it is using almost 1 GB of RAM at idle. I do want to get rid of Vista, I ordered a pre-release W 7 disk, it won't be delivered until December 9th. I intend to increase the amount of RAM in the Compaq. W 7 is also a resource hog.

Several programs written for XP in my 3 year old Gateway are not compatible with W 7. The advice given is to contact the manufacturer of those programs for upgrades. I doubt if there will be free upgrades for all, or most of them. I'm going to leave XP in that one.

Rex

Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor Beta

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/deta ... laylang=en

This is the unanswered question sparks.

I've only used a few Vista machines so no experience here. Generally I don't like automated things on a personal PC and don't trust MS to make it work well. Server automation is another thing

Every thing can run silently in the back ground, with no "blinking lights".