No Snakebites

Medusa seems pleased with her new look. The Stepchild behaved and did not raise a ruckus while all this went on. The process was long, though, because I needed to do a backup for safety before starting the upgrade. That went well but ate up a couple of hours.

The upgrade itself took longer. Longer than I thought it would (or should) and there were times I thought it was "stuck". It tried my patience. For a lazy and indifferent person, I have amazingly little patience.

Before I do an upgrade, or any major change, I search the net for reports of problems and the experiences of others doing the same. There was only one problem that seemed to warrant an official response from MS regarding my particular upgrade situation. And that problem did not arise for me.

A few things look a little different, some have changed considerably, and it will be a little while before I am comfortable with this new operating system.

For example, I like to use Wordpad to write my blog posts. It's simple, uncluttered, and does the job for me. Well, of course they have changed Wordpad and cluttered it up a bit. If I used it to write letters, I might like it. It's much more full featured, closer to a real word processor now. Though you won't confuse it with a full word processor.

You can rotate your wallpaper now without installing a third party utility. That's a nice feature, though setting it up was a little confusing to me.

I am not enthused with the mail program it supports; Windows Live Mail. This is actually part of a suite of programs, most of which I have no use for either because I have perfectly good substitutes or because I have no interest in the purpose of the program. I liked the old one. In fact, I liked Outlook Express from way back. Yeah, I'm pretty hopeless. But it seems like everything is geared toward connecting to as many others as possible and on a practically constant basis. That is definitely not me. I like my privacy, my own space, not MySpace or Facebook. I confess, I don't Twitter either.

All seems well here, though, so I suppose that means I have two more machines to upgrade. I learned nothing special from doing this upgrade that might help others perform one smoothly. I did install Windows Live Mail ahead of time, just so I wouldn't have to do it later. And I did run the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor and got (and installed) whatever driver updates it thought I would need.

And it all went without any profanity being spewed. Day-um!