<geek ramble> A week ago I flattened my Vista Home Premium laptop and spruced it up with a spangly new copy of Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate (RTM) 64-bit.. and I won’t be looking back. I’ve decided it’s all or nothing with Microsoft now so I’ll be abandoning the idea of moving to an open source operating system for the forseeable future. Once Windows 7 was up and running (which it was very quickly and cleanly with no issues at all), to get the full benefit I moved my email services from GMail to Windows Live Hotmail. I discovered a fancy little-known feature of Windows Live at http://domains.live.com which lets Microsoft host your email. This means I didn’t need to move to a hotmail.co.uk or live.co.uk email address and could carry on using the same Live profile I’d been using on MSN Messenger for years. Using the domain service allows my calendar, contacts, mail, notes (using the Outlook Connector) to be centrally hosted under the cloud concept. My only bugbear with this is Windows Live Hotmail still doesn’t let you have a folder-in-folder structure so for now my archived mail will sit on Google’s servers.
Other nifty things I’ve discovered so far in Windows 7 include a stable standby / resume which never worked properly on Vista for me. Readyboost is still there too letting me use an SD memory card as a cache between the hard drive and RAM for a performance boost and works just as well as Vista. Internet Explorer, via the Windows Live Toolbar and SkyDrive will synchronise your favourites between all your machines at last. This was probably available a while back but I have only just noticed it. I took a look at Windows Live Mesh too, which has a potential to be pretty good. Microsoft give you 5GB of online storage space and once the Mesh client has been installed allow you to ‘share’ folders and documents on your PC with other machines on your Mesh network. This Mesh network could be in your home, or it could span the Internet – sadly it doesn’t work with folders on a network drive, such as a NAS, but it does allow you to remote control your desktop back at home from any* web browser.. (* Internet Explorer of course).
From a compatability side of things I’ve had no problems at all. All my usual applications run fine (I’ve abandoned Photoshop in favour of GIMP which is my only open source concession), Microsoft Office 2007 is unchanged of course (come on Office 2010), the now discontinued Microsoft Money works (I must find an alternative to this some time soon), as does the Canon CD and photo printing software and FirstClass (for the Open University).
My next job is to test out Windows Home Server which promises to create automatic backups of my machines and work as centralised storage, as well as provide media streaming around the home. Not sure if I’ll actually use it properly, but I feel the need to test it out at the very least. </geek ramble>
I’m bored