Windows XP went out kicking and screaming!!!

windows7_bloglogo Last night was the night my household finally went 100% pure Windows 7.  I flattened our five year old Dell Inspiron 6000 my daughter uses and installed Windows 7. 

I was impressed with the massive difference Windows 7 made on the overall behavior of the Inspiron 6000.  Now to be fair, there were two significant changes.  First, I pulled the 5400rpm drive out of the machine and replaced it with a nice 100GB 7200rpm drive.  I didn’t realize any of our machines still had 5400rpm drives.  That must have been payback for something that happened a couple of years ago.

Then of course there are a couple of years of Windows XP teen abuse.  Nothing like the smell of a clean install in the morning to fix that.  For those of you that support teen machines, you know what I mean.  It’s alarming sometimes the level of “modification” that takes place when you hand admin privilege to a teenager.  Think of it like a tax write-off.  It’ll help you stay sane.

Anyway, the only problem I encountered was with the audio.  I had to download the Sigmatel driver for Windows Vista from the dell.com support area.  I was really happy that worked.  I would have been up a creek if it didn’t.

The Elder Statesman

My oldest machine that is running Windows 7 is nearly seven years old.  It’s the Dell Dimension 4600 we bought years ago and it has lived a long and fruitful life.  I’m actually quite amazed it still works, and it’s even more amazing it runs Windows 7 pretty well.  The NVIDIA GeForce 7600 video card in it has a little to do with that.  It doesn’t have quite enough CPU horsepower to decode HDTV with fluid real time playback.

This particular machine was a SBS 2003 server running Exchange and ISA Server in it’s early years.  Later it served several other roles including being the work horse behind the counter at my wife's retail store.  Right now it’s relegated to the hall of fame until one of my nieces or nephews comes along with sad eyes.  I’m sure it will find a new home this Christmas.

Anyway, everything I have is running the almighty Windows 7 now.  Thanks to the Windows team for focusing on the fundamentals with the OS, so older machines could still have a life.