17. Windows 7

At the risk of sounding patronizing or as if I were advertising something, I will say that yes, Windows 7 is definitely something to look forward to having nowadays. Especially if you’ve been using Windows Vista.

I never thought I would advocate or advertise anything by Microsoft or even remotely related to Bill Gates and Microsoft, but you’ve got to admit that we’re prisoners of technology when we become dependent on them to make what we do and what we want to do easier.

When I arrived in Canada four years less a week to the day, I was impatient to get my computer  up and running. It would have been so much easier if I had known the people I know now, but that’s the past. Unfortunately, the best option I had was to purchase a brand new system, which I decided to do, since a great deal of what I do is dependent on my having a computer with my files and the software I needed to do what I wanted to do. I thought, back then, that I should have Windows XP or XP Pro, but nobody was selling that anymore. Or, if they had it, they weren’t pushing it. What they were pushing was the brand new Windows Vista, which came pre-loaded on all the new computers. So Vista it was.

At the start, it wasn’t too bad. But after a whole year of being loaded with all sorts of files and games by 2 co-users, which I really did not want on them, then another year of uninstalling all the said files and constantly trying to update or clean out files, several of my programs might have lost a file or two here and there in the process. After another year of almost constant use, despite the most judicious defragging and optimizing and updating and scanning, my whole system was slowly deteriorating, getting bogged down by all the start-up programs and all the cookies and caches it had to go through just performing a single task. At least I didn’t have any more co-users cluttering up my drives.

Soon, my browsers were constantly crashing and I must have re-installed several programs over and over again just to get them working. To my dismay, it was still not enough. I had finally reached the conclusion that I had to upgrade to something better than Vista and all the reports about Windows 7 had been good, notwithstanding all the hype. Thank goodness for a friend who is a wiz at computers, I wiped my C drive clean and, with Windows 7, am now up and running.

And how!

I am like a child in a candy store, and have yet to fully explore and exploit my new system, but I already like what I’ve seen so far. It will probably be days, maybe even weeks, before I’ve checked everything out that I can, but I know this excitement will last me for quite a good long time!