Saturday

The road to Windows 7 was rather short

Filed under PC

ok, so Meeper (the other fellow who supposedly posts around here) will beat my ass when he reads this, but after being rather well known as being pretty “meh” on the subject of Windows 7, I now seem to be running it. I know, I know. Meeper even said this sort of thing would happen. See, it’s like this…

My initial thing about Win7 was that I could see no tangible benefit to switching to it. XP worked fine, so why bother? No one could assure me it was faster than XP, all I ever heard was that it’s “pretty” and “new”. Pretty and new do not cut it, I’m after performance so I was indifferent to the entire thing. This attitude held fast until very recently when Meeper got a nice shiny new i7 system which has a release candidate of Win7 64 bit on it. As soon as he pointed out it was running with 6GB of ram my “meh” attitude started to fade. I have to admit to being an overclocker, and also to being the sort who is always trying to come up with new ways to get more out of his system. I had thought I’d pushed my current Q6600 rig to something approaching it’s limits, then this Win7 RAM thing came up. Yes a 64 bit operating system would allow for more RAM and that would absolutely qualify as something I’d be interested in. More. I would say at that point I was about 60% resolved to move to Win7 at some point down the road, but I still held on to the “meh” feeling as best I could. Meeper then started telling me about tangible benefits to Win7 and all this RAM, like being able to alt-tab out of a game so quickly and running with no swap file etc. Hearing that stuff moved me to about 65% interested in Win7.

Giving in to the 65%, I decided that come October I’d likely buy a copy of Win7 and with a view towards that I stopped by my local computer shop and picked up 4GB of OCZ Reaper 8500. I figured I could use the new RAM to it’s full potential with Win7, but until then I’d get about 3GB worth in XP (as opposed to my previous 2GB) so why not. I stuffed it in, and left it at that. Then, it happened. Continue…