Windows 7 on Hagrid

Hagrid as seen from my POV

Hagrid, my big and ugly laptop, never really got that Ubuntu feeling of freedom. Something about the device drivers probably; the wireless LAN lost connection all the time, and the ATI video drivers ran SL like a clumsy giant.

Ubuntu is an African word meaning
'Humanity to others', or
'I am what I am because of who we all are'.

On Friday, a Win 7 upgrade disc dropped down on my desk. It really was destined to my desktop PC; part of Microsoft's free upgrade to Win 7 when you bought a PC with Vista a few months before Win 7 was released. But that machine runs Ubuntu 9.10 like a charm; I have no intention of ever changing that. So I decided to take the plunge, gave Hagrid a strong memory potion (read «disk wipe»), and did a clean install of Microsoft's latest.

The result was really nothing short of getting a new computer! Windows 7 seems to run almost as smooth as Linux. I get this feeling that the PC now works with me, while the Vista install worked against me. All the free software I usually run on it (GIMP, OpenOffice.org, Firefox and Sun VirtualBox in particular) worked flawlessly, as did iTunes and almost everything else I tried. The only exception being USB audio against my Cambride DacMagic; the sound is full of distortion. But the optical digital connection worked very well though.

I was not in-world a lot (almost nothing in fact), but Boy Lanes Rainbow viewer seemed to work very well for the few minutes that I got to try it.

Now it's back to work in the open source world; this text was written on Lyra (my Ubuntu-powered netbook) in the back seat while car-pooling; now I'm uploading it to the blog using my Ubuntu powered Internet connected desktop, before turning around to the Ubuntu powered internal networked computer to do work on our Red Hat Linux servers. Despite all the colorful Windows, Freedom still rules!