With the exception of maybe, Snow Leopard (which doesn’t count), I have never purchased and installed an entirely new operating system for any of my machines in the many, MANY years I have been using them. I’ve always either bought a new one, with a new OS on it, or soldiered on with whatever I had.

Last weekend I decided it was time to give the PC the gift of Windows 7.

I consider myself to be about 90% proof when it comes to PC use. I’m good at fixing things (Google helps), and I am technical to the point of everything before altering things in the registry. So I’m not sure why I panicked when it came to installing. Everything was backed up, as far as I was aware, so I wasn’t going to lose anything. Perhaps I thought the main hard disc would corrupt itself when I formatted it and I’d have to spend yet more money on the PC to get it working. That didn’t happen either, in fact, everything went smoothly.

Which gets me wondering, how many people are putting off changing or upgrading the OS simply because they’re petrified. Must be loads of people. LOADS.

Not only did I get over the OS upgrade fear this week, I have updated the software for my motherboard. I thought about getting some RAM but there’s conflicting details about just how much I can put in it (it’s a very basic board, folks), and I’ve even installed a brand new graphics card (I needed an HDMI output). I’ve located software and drivers for all my innards and installed and sorted them all out. Hell, I even bought a can of compressed air and cleaned out the dust mine. And wow, that was a LOT of dust I got rid of.

The PC has had a hardware and software spring clean, it’s kind of liberating. I should do a wipe once every six months to get rid of all the applications I just don’t use. The MacBook is doing all the photo processing, the video editing and the music production, the PC is for email, internet browsing, Twitter and games. That’s how it’s worked itself out now.

The MacBook has a new companion, a 1 terabyte drive, and backs up automatically with Time Machine – I don’t even have to remember to back it up, it does it itself. What an age we are living in. This and iPhone 4.0 is likely to be announced at some point (someone says Sunday, but when have Apple ever made an announcement on a Sunday?)

Meanwhile, if you’re in the UK and fast on your feet, you can find the PC edition of Bioshock for £7.00 at Asda. I have started playing today with my Windows Xbox Controller, which, incidentally, Windows 7 also thinks is a floppy drive.

Tags: maintenance, pc, upgrade, windows

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 7:07 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.