Windows 7 Unexpectedly

I'm typing this on a Windows 7 machine. I hadn't planned on installing Windows 7 tonight. In fact, I had decided to put it off until after the first of the year. I just had too much to do to mess with a new operating system at the moment.

Well.

The fun started with Vista nattering at me about some updates. Normally, it just does it, then tells me about it. When I finally got sick of this thing popping up in my face, I clicked on it and saw there were several optional updates. To shut it up, I told it to do it already. One of the updates was a new driver for my video card.

Well.

Updates ran, system wanted to reboot, I said yea, and a couple minutes later, instead of my 1920x1080 screen, I have mush: text was completely unreadable, graphics had all sorts of weird fringing going on, and it was all smashed into the center 2/3 of the screen with the top and bottom bleeding off the screen. Zooming the TV didn't help, rebooting didn't help, fiddling with screen resolutions didn't help. I headed over to AMD, grabbed the latest driver. No joy. Uninstall and install a previous version. No joy. Looked around on the web and found I wasn't alone, but no one really had an answer. I finally found a combination of screen resolution and zoom factor that was at least usable, figured there would be an fix in a day or two, and moved on to the next project.

Well.

The next project was to get a wireless router on our cable modem. The nice mailman just so happened to have dropped one off today, so I opened up the box and started in. Everything looked good until the router tried to access the internet. It said it couldn't. Oddly, I could. Did all the usual unplug-count-to-five-plug-back-in jazz. Now neither it nor I could find the internet. Reboot and restart the router's install process. Dies again. Try evil and potent magic while cursing wildly. Nothing. Finally get tired of broken crap, pull out the router, throw it along with its little power brick and Cat-5 cable in the middle of the living room floor (where they remain to this moment), direct-plug the cable modem back into the PC, reboot. At least I can get to the internet, but the whole mess is still acting flaky. In fact, the whole mess had been acting flaky since it came out of the box and got set up last week.

Enough.

I ran my xcopy job to copy the user areas from drive C to the Drobo, unplugged the Drobo, put in my Windows 7 DVD, rebooted, told it to burn everything to the ground and start over. Two hours later, I'm running Windows 7.

Sweet.

I can tell already that it's going to take some getting used to. The interface is very clean, which is a problem when you are used to the old way. But I think I will be able to adapt fairly quickly. And of course, the PC has that nice snappy feel of a new Windows install before it gets all grunged up.

Well, I need to get things set back up on my nice, (sort of) new, (kind of) shiny PC.