Microsoft Windows 7 - Gain without much Pain . . .

With the impending end of Microsoft’s support for their venerable and very successful Windows XP, I had been wrestling with the relative benefits of either “upgrading” my existing main desktop PC to Windows 7, or replacing it entirely, with the risk of having to put up with the almost universally reviled Windows 8.

I had been using Windows 7 on a  borrowed PC for some time and had become relatively comfortable with that environment, and so decided to take the plunge and go down the “upgrade” route with my 7-year old, reasonably specced (for its time) machine.

I purchased a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium from a seemingly reputable (according to the feedback) EBay supplier  and a brand new hard drive from EBuyer.com ( the thinking there being that there was an easy route back if the Windows 7 installation proved to be a disaster).

I have to say that the whole business went surprisingly well right from the initial minor surgery to replace the primary hard drive on my PC, which even included a vacuum out of the dust, cobwebs and general detritus which had accumulated in the last 12 months since I last had the machine apart.

The Windows 7 installation itself went very smoothly, the most anxious moments being those during which I waited with baited breath to see if my 25-digit licence code would be accepted (it was!).

I am not a player of games, apart from the “normal secretarial duties” of EMails, web surfing and writing documents, my machine spends most of its time running fairly esoteric Audio Spectrum Analysis DSP software associated with my hobby of recording “radio meteors” so the amount of software I had to re-install was relatively small.   Everything I installed worked pretty well without any problems and here I am a day later with a machine with a completely new operating system installed running every program I use regularly, consequently I am as “Pleased as Punch”.

The only downside is that of the new Microsoft Office 2013 which I have had “in stash” for a while ready to be installed on a Windows 7 (or later) machine.   This has appears to have been designed to have a “Windows 8” look about it, and frankly it’s horrible to look at.  I felt obliged to install this heavyweight package due to it (a) being cheap due to an arrangement my employer has with Microsoft, and (b) there is no built-in EMail client in Windows 7.  

I could of course opted for something like OpenOffice with Mozilla Thunderbird, but I had the Office install disk already.   Maybe more on that later, but at the moment I am struggling to find any nice words about Office 2013, but I should probably give it more time before I put virtual pen to paper!  It appears to work fine, but it just looks DREADFUL.   That’s a great shame as one of Windows 7‘s greatest appeals is that it “looks nice”, to me, anyway . . .

Weekends are just too short!

Working away from home during the week inevitably that the weekend proper gets off to a slow and delayed start.

Generally I am so pooped on Friday evening that I am incapable of doing anything remotely demanding, and 24 hours later I am just starting to feel like myself again.

This is how it was last weekend.

Then there is the lawn mowing, plus doing the same for a neighbour who has had the misfortune of having had a heart-attack recently.

The band had a gig too, so that took care of Saturday.

Then there is the paperwork.  You have to be very careful working away that things don't get missed, credit card bills and the like.

What I am trying to say is that, even though the transistors for my TS-180S had arrived, I never got round to fitting the replacement into my PLL WBA.

However, a chance conversation with a colleague about a really neat application from the Sysinternals people (now assimilated by the Borg (sorry, Microsoft!)) called "Desktops" which allows windows users to have multiple desktops in the same way that Ubuntu users have been able to for quite some time.

This little program was downloaded in a trice and installed almost as quickly, and WOW it really is great!

If you do bizarre things with PCs like I do, then this little gem is a godsend.   However, my rather bizarre setup involves having three PCs on line (one is remote in the shed, the other two in my house "radio room") and as all three PCs how potentially have four desktops available at the click of a mouse, then you can guess how confused a fatigued brain can become.

Another anti-Linux rant, I'm afraid.

Today, for reasons I won't bore you with, I had to move my "Linux box" to a different location, and the new location demanded a different mouse to the one I was using previously. Naturally I planned to use the Linux GUI rather than the command console.

The first mouse which came to hand happened to be an old but nice Microsoft serial mouse (remember those?).

Well you would think setting up Linux to work with a serial mouse would be easy, wouldn't you?

Wrong!

I did a fair bit of research on the internet, noting from that others had had similar problems.

None of the suggested remedies I tried worked. I gave up in the end and located a spare USB mouse which worked straight away.

OK, so serial mice are definitely "old school", but I would have thought that there were a fair few in use around the world.

Linux really is PANTS!