I finally took the plunge and upgraded to Windows 7. I kept hearing from everyone just how much better than Vista it was. And Vista being such a dog, it sure sounded like nirvana was just around the corner; nope.

Let’s start with this; Vista was one of the worst operating systems ever. Yeah, I said it. With this computer I have it would freeze up, it wouldn’t save any of my settings, it didn’t like certain programs or certain hardware I’d attach to it… just a litany of things I hated about it. So, the upgrade to Windows 7 is certainly better than what I had before in that regard.

At least partially. The first time I loaded it (yup, had to load it more than once) it took more than 4 hours, even though everyone said it should only take an hour, if that. I didn’t lose any real work time since I started loading it around 10:30 in the evening but I also couldn’t go off and do anything else, including going to bed and just ignoring it, because like all other operating systems I knew there would be questions I’d have to answer and things I had to do.

It loaded, and I tested it for about 30 minutes before shutting it down and going to bed. It looked pretty good, everything moved around okay, but I didn’t notice anything better or worse.

The next day it was time to load all the updates, and there were a lot of them. It took 2 hours to load them all, not including the service pack or the new IE 9. I was able to work while all that was going on so it didn’t impede anything I had to do. Of course when it was done it wanted me to reboot, so I did; so far no real issues.

That is, until I decided to load the service pack. That sucker took 2 hours once again, and when it was done I had to reboot. The computer never came back… that is, it rebooted, then immediately went to a black screen, and it stayed like that for 2 hours. I let it sit there, thinking it was processing something, but I figured 2 hours was long enough. So I forced it to reboot, which it did, and when it came back to the wallpaper I figured that it was all fine.

But I have Mailwasher, my email program, automatically load and open at startup, and it didn’t start. I tried opening it and got an error message. Matter of fact, every program I tried to open, except for the explorer folder, gave me an error message. And once I got the explorer folder open, it wouldn’t let me open any files, executable or not. It wouldn’t even let me get into the control panel or system restore. I eventually had to boot up in safe mode so I could remove the service pack. I tried it a second time a week later; no dice, but this time I was able to get into a repair module which removed the service pack. I’m not trying it again.

There’s also a feature in Windows 7 that allows you to select which program you’d like to use to open certain types of files. Only it doesn’t work; it opens file with whatever it’s decided it wants to use. Especially irritating is Windows Image Viewer, which comes with Win 7, but you can’t do anything except view images with it. I use a different program for images, but the settings won’t remember it and won’t use it. I’ve researched it online and found that many people have this same complaint but no one can do a thing about it. I even went into the registry to look around and I thought about removing every reference to it, but then I might have to load Windows 7a third time.

Oh yeah, why did I load it a second time? It was working better than Vista but there were still some wonky things going on. A tech friend of mine suggested loading it again, so I did. Overall resources seem to be handled pretty well but I’ve noticed that, for whatever reason, if I’m not at the computer for a few hours sometimes it freaks and decides to shut itself down, then upon my return and reboot it says it recovered from an unexpected error; aren’t all errors unexpected? I’ve also tried to research this, but to no avail.

I paid more than $100 for this? Nope, I’m not satisfied, but I’m still not going Mac so y’all that are about to tout it don’t even bother. lol Well, at least I’m not going that route yet I’ll say, because I also said I was never buying a smartphone and of course I did.

Maybe technology just hates me; sigh…