It's not a disaster, but it's kind of like getting a new pair of glasses: everything looks strange for a while. I've got some work to do, though.

One huge, huge cool thing: you can choose "Classic Windows" look for the UI, and go back to windows looking the way they did in XP. Which means, not like a Mac. Square corners. No weird ass icons. Man, it's like meeting a long lost friend that I'd thought had died.

One huge, huge bad thing: my shortcut area is gone on the task bar. Which means I'm crippled doing nearly anything.

UPDATE: Turns out it was called "quick launch". You enter that in the help, and the first entry that turns up is "What happened to the Quick Launch?"

The answer? We got rid of it. Use "pin program to task bar" instead. Except that "pin program to task bar" uses full sized icons, and I used to have about 35 programs in my quick launch.

UPDATE: Did Microsoft change the driver model again?

Few if any of the custom drivers came through. I'm currently using a generic display driver -- which nonetheless is able to choose a 1920*1200 mode, that being the native size of this LCD. But performance ain't great, and special features are nil. I tried running the performance analysis which shows up in the Games folder. It gave me scores of about 5.8 for CPU, RAM, and HD, and a flat 1.0 for graphics.

ASUS has a Hooray for Win7 web site, and it has a place to click to go download new drivers. But when I do that for the G2S (this computer model) it asks me for the target OS, and Win7 isn't listed for the G2S.

Fortunately, it is listed for the Xonar sound module, but the only driver is a beta. However, it works. And after I reinstalled the CCCP, I was able to play an MKV file using Zoom Player.

Meanwhile, I'm also using a generic mouse driver and there isn't any way to turn off the touchpad. So when I'm typing, or if I'm mousing, and not paying attention, suddenly the carat will zoom off because I've brushed the touch pad by mistake.

What I think I'm going to hope is that the Vista drivers will work, and I'm going to dig up the driver CD that came with the computer and try it.

UPDATE: Looks like I have to rely on NVidia for drivers. I've found one they say works with Vista and Win7, and works on my hardware (8600M GT) but the package is 115 megabytes so it's taking a while to download.

UPDATE: Actually, my biggest concern right now is Agent, my mail program. It's installed and running, but I've lost 2 years worth of mail, everything dating back to the last time I updated it to a new version. As part of that update they moved all the folders somewhere else and I don't know where so I can't dig them out of the backups.

UPDATE: Flash CS3 remembered my ID number, but didn't remember that I'd already set it up and registered it.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 06:50 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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