Going to win7

Having tried Ubuntu, I reached the conclusion that it is a very good operating system, offering a great bang for buck if you consider the only cost to be of financial nature (division by zero would mean infinity). But it still has its limitations. One of them became apparent only after doing a video card upgrade.
(More about that soon)



While upgrading the video card, I also had to unplug some hard drive SATA cables that were in the way... and I'm not sure that I plugged them back in in the exact same slots. Long story short, Ubuntu 9.10 was no longer booting up, dying with a kernel panic and some error about the file system. All Windows XP said was that it had to be reactivated.

That and the fact that I want to play games, most of which are designed for Windows, made me stick to the Windows family of operating systems. Because it is the better option for me. And since Windows 7 is the next iteration, I am jumping on it. The most striking thing about it though is... well... the cost. It's really expensive. I mean... I thought it was expensive having seen the US prices: and the Ultimate version was 319$. What I forgot was that trying to buy the thing from the US store didn't go as I would have liked (pay, download, use), instead being redirected to the european store... where is was also costing 319... but euros. Now I know that the cost in the US doesn't include a bunch of taxes, while the ones in the euro-zone must include VAT, but still... That's a big difference considering the currency parity of 1 EUR = 1.43 USD, valid at the time this article was written.

The US Store

The European store

But then I remembered a very interesting post by Jeff Atwood related to using different prices for different customers: It's a marketing scheme! Damn those weasels! Oh well, here's another lee-hee-heetle detail: the cost is the same as in a regular store, so the age where a version you download yourself (legally I mean) is cheaper than one found at a retailer is simply not yet here. Luckily, it does have some features: you can choose from 4 versions of ultimate (32 and 64 bits, ISO and direct system download). I went the classical route: take the ISO, burn it to a DVD, reboot and do a clean install.

I know it's in German

The usual Microsoft Download Manager

As you may have noticed, this switch to Windows 7 isn't very recent; it's been more than 2 weeks since the install process finished and I started fighting the usual OS switch issues: drivers. It's just that I couldn't really find the time to (15 minutes) to finish this post. Laziness...

Gusty out.