Windows 7

I am ashamed to admit that I do have a computer at home that runs Windows, though it is pretty much for games. That computer, as is often the case, is also my fastest, bestest PC. Recently, Windows XP decided to try and eat some of its own files, so things haven't been working so well, lately - the blue screens tend to wake me up at night.

Since all of my plans today got canceled, I decided to give reinstall that machine with 64bit Windows 7. I will say that they've streamlined the installer nicely - mostly I didn't have to sit and watch the install to answer questions sprinkled throughout. I told it how I wanted to partition the disk, it overrode me to make a 100MB partition (which turns out to be system recovery junk) and did some stuff. It rebooted, I entered account info and sat back until it was done. Must better than XP's installer.

I'm still trying to get over the cheesy cartoon look that Vista/7 use. I'm not sure without a machine next to me to compare with, but it seems like the window decorations just take up more space, too. But so far, the worst part is that all the dialog boxes that pop up (like 'insert disk 2') pop under the main window. I thought Civilization 4 was just taking a long time to respond until I moved the main install screen out of the way. It seems to happen about 50% of the time. On the plus side, I now have a full 4GB available for Windows to use. There's half a gig of unused memory in that chip that XP couldn't see!

Assuming everything runs in 64bit Windows 7, I guess I should keep it since everyone else will be using it eventually. Now I just need to figure out how to keep Explorer from closing every time I eject a CD...