Day: January 14, 2013

Well, for the second time in as many weeks, I find myself taking a day to reinstall Windows 7. The last one was for a cousin; this latest was for me.

As I mentioned the other day, something went wrong with my Win8 installation and it wouldn't boot. And, since I was running a Release Preview that was set to expire by the end of the week anyway, I decided it would be kinda stupid to spend any time trying to fix it, so I just backed up My Documents and reinstalled Win7.

Win8 is pretty much what everybody's said it is: a perfectly decent touchscreen interface with some discoverability issues, awkwardly grafted onto a traditional Windows interface, Frankenstein-fashion. Seeing as I don't have a touchscreen, I see no reason whatever to keep Windows 8.

Well, that's not entirely true -- some of the tweaks to the traditional Windows interface are damn fine: I like having a Task Manager that doesn't just report CPU and RAM usage but also hard drive and network activity (meaning no more "What the fuck is making the HD light blink like crazy when nothing's taking up more than 1% of the CPU?!"), and a filecopy interface that isn't a fucking 1980's holdover designed for transferring files between a 1.44MB floppy and an 80MB hard drive. I had a job once that consisted of copying databases -- single files ranging from 15-40GB -- to laptops all day. And when there was a network hiccup, it would abort the transfer and I'd have to start all over from the beginning. Almost as annoying: copying a user's entire home directory, hundreds or thousands of files, and if a single one fails, the entire transfer cancels itself.

Windows 8 has finally baked in filecopy tools that allow for pausing and resuming file transfers -- not just in command-line tools but in the standard Explorer UI.

Course, you only get that if you upgrade to Win8. Don't want a silly-ass tablet-style interface on your desktop? Well, then you get to stick with the old Task Manager and filecopy, too.

Meantime, I had a job interview today. And if all goes well, I'll have a lot more Windows 7 installations in my immediate future.