My Computer Bit It

[The Warren]

Oh we found that out about XP a loooong time ago, when we ended up with Vista and looked into getting a copy of XP to "upgrade". It was near impossible, and then when we did get ahold of an XP disk, we needed HD drivers to even install it and anyway it wouldn't support the 8 gig memory we had, so we said f-it. We kept Vista, and then later upgraded to 7. Cuz having an OS that could only support 4 gigs of RAM when I had 8 woulda sucked.

I ended up with Win 8 of course. YOu can still special order PCs with 7, but whatever. I figured if it sucked butt really bad, I could find a Win 7 disk for sale somewhere. After a lot of tweaking the heck out of it, it's okay. It is not designed for desktops/laptops. Windows needs to fix that much with it, so that if you have a non-touch device you can easily configure it to work in PC/Desktop mode and ditch all the stupid "apps" and the stupid start screen. For now, you have to download 3rd party tools and do other things. I was lucky, I bought a PC without all the added bloatware, just Windows 8 and nothing else. It made setting up a lot easier without having to deal with all the other useless crap big name companies put on their machines.

Turned out I also had an issue with the monitor, which took a few weeks to sort out. It was highly technical and required us to install an old graphics card from like 2 graphics cards back and booting off a DOS disk in order to fix corrupted information in the monitor itself. Srsly. Win 8/Win 7 and the latest graphics cards don't work with the easier fixes like editing the registry or hacking the drivers.

We've been mad busy with work, so we don't have everything fully configured still on this machine, just bare essentials - browsers, office, email, some games we don't get time to play anymore. *sigh*

So far though - we like our new PC and now that we've "fixed" the OS, it's like using Win 7.

My work laptop is still XP. I really liked Win 7 better than XP. Wish they would upgrade the rest of us. My laptop came with Win 7 originally, but my department had not approved use of Win 7 and Office 2010 yet due to program compatibility issues. Office 2010 eventually rolled out to everyone, but probably not going to see an OS upgrade until I have to replace the laptop.