Missed Web free your inner fez

oh microsoft, you sexy beast you

I'm writing this on my laptop at the moment. If I was feeling pretentious, I would have said my Macbook Pro and BootCamp, but I'm not really feeling pretentious. Just bored. Why would someone with some much technological power be bored? Because I want to upgrade to Microsoft's Window's 7, which came out last week.

Now, normally, I wait a year before upgrading to a new Windows OS. Windows ME and Vista were the two exceptions because they. sucked. badly. But with our players being excited and saying positive things about Windows 7, and several guys at the company not voicing any OMFG complaints about it, I decided to upgrade, even though I am an XP user.

I'm not sure why Microsoft is doing this, but if you're an XP user, you either have to do a clean XP install before upgrading to Windows 7, or upgrade to Windows Vista and then Windows 7. This is an odd thing to make users do, and I'm really curious as to why this route was taken. Anyway, as I'm not spending money to upgrade to Vista, I'm going the clean XP install route. The problem with that is you have to manually reinstall all of your applications. The good news is that Microsoft has an application called Windows Easy Transfer which will conveniently gather together all of your files and settings into disk image files and store them on the external hard drive of your choosing.

Sounds wonderful! Except that it's taking so long I've turned 40, 50, 60, 70... just waiting for it to finish. And in true Windows fashion, it is giving me the most ridiculous transfer times I have ever seen. Three hours, five hours, seven hours, two hours. It can't seem to make up its mind! I think it's been running for about 5 hours now. It's 820p. It says it will be done in 2 hours, 15 minutes. We'll see.

My original plan was to purchase a new drive and simply slave the old to it. On the new drive I would have done a fresh XP install and upgrade to Win 7. With my drive slaved, I wouldn't have to worry about transferring files over. I ordered a Seagate 1 terabyte SATA drive, but unfortunately, it just wouldn't work. I kept getting a blue screen error, and no matter what I did, I couldn't get it to work. I even hooked up my original drive and slaved the Seagate to it. The result? There was none. The Seagate wasn't bing seen at all. Back to Amazon for that one, and I'm stuck doing a slow file transfer of 160 gigs of files and settings.

Windows 7 better come with hookers and ale after all I've done to try to update to it.

Oh, and as a coincidence, my brother Jason is also updating his system, but he's doing a full install. Things were going fine for him until he accidentally unplugged the computer near the end of the install. Poor guy *bigshitgrin*

Update: Robert just linked me to this comic