Windows 7: It doesn't suck

Initially I went into this whole windows thing with a hint of optimism that I fully expected to have crushed and ground to dust beneath Bill Gates' vicious dream-crushing boot heel.

However... I have to say... it pretty much went smoothly.

Now, I put this copy on my tablet, since that's what I do all my art on, and that's what really needed a bit of a boost to get running more smoothly. As mentioned before, I was really hoping for the performance boost from a 64 bit OS, which, quit frankly, has materialized more or less as promised.

So it's taken me about two and a half days to get up to 100% functionality again. And a huge portion of that time (nearly a day) was spent with me trying to track down exotic tablet drivers (I had to use Vista 64 drivers to get some tablet buttons to work).

Two days to get a fresh OS installed and port all of my important files and get all the hardware and software I need working has got to be a record for me, as far as microsoft products go. Not just a small improvement; I think it used to take me weeks to get everything cobbled back together in the past.

The performance gain is huge as well. Granted, a big part of that may simply be from going to 64 bit from 32 bit, and using almost all 64 bit software now. That also let me use my full 4 gigs of RAM (rather than 3.12), so I can't really say how this would stack up against Vista 64 performance wise.

I also finally got around to plopping that new hard drive I bought way back when in this thing, giving me an extra 140 gigs to fill up with garbage. The new drive runs sort of hot though, which causes me a little concern, but so far so good.

I do have a few complaints though, so it's not all puppydogs and rainbows.

1. I want my old "Show Desktop" button back, you bastards! They moved the god damn thing to the right side of the screen with a tiny icon now, rather than the old left side one we're all used to. Of course, someone already wrote a utility to insert a little .exe that does the exact same thing, so it's sort of resolved, even though I shouldn't have to go through hoops to get it.
2. Let me pin what I want, god damnit. Pinning is a weird new sort of concept that I do like; it's sort of a merging of the old taskbar with the quick launch bar, and it's actually done fairly well and is *gasp* almost intuitive. For some reason Microsoft has seen fit to only let you pin links to .exe's though; you can't pin a folder or link or anything. This is dumb, in my opinion, although there are convoluted tweaks/hacks to get it to pin anything. They should just put in an option to allow users to pin whatever the hell they want, although I can see how non-savvy users might get completely befuddled by it. If they change this, this would actually resolve issue one.
3. I can't think of anything else right now. I feel that I should have more than two gripes, this being a Microsoft product and all, but that's all I've come up with so far. I guess that's a testament to Microsoft's efforts to get past the well deserved drubbing they got over Vista.

On some level I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop and for something to go catastrophically wrong, because Microsoft has conditioned me to have that Pavlovian response when working with their products, but so far, so good.

I think I'll wind up making a post about optimizing Photoshop CS4 for Windows 7, especially from a tablet/notebook perspective.

The image there is an evil Horgle Slug, some sort of space vermin I made up and drew today. Rainy days are nice, because I don't get any glare on my tablet screen when I'm drawing during lunch while chillin' in my pickup. Saw the new Star Trek last night, which was pretty damn good, so I'm in a sci-fi mood, rather than wacky fantasy like normal.