Recently I’ve just upgraded my compies from XP to Win 7. What a pile of gunk vista turned out to be fortunately win 7 is a very nice OS. It looks good, behaves very well and is super configurable. The art work, icons and the glass aero theme all work together very well.

I’m not sure if I’m correct in saying so, but it feels Win 7 makes more use of the hardware, which is maybe obvious as it requires more resources but it doesn’t feel slugish the experience is quite pleasant.

I was quite impressed when upgrading. Its the first time I’ve actually planned an upgrade as the cleanest upgrade from XP is a clean install. I backed up my firefox settings with MozBackup which saves all your settings and can even save your extensions. Watch out for google gears its best to un-install that and reinstall later. The upgrades on my main pc and the laptop took under 30 mins from beginning of install to logging into windows. And the install only asks a few questions and merrily works its way through the install.

I’m not one to follow hype but it did feel like lots for Win 7 so I thought I would take a look. I was super disappointed with vista and was very wary and cautious about how it would turn out. What I like is the new theme, I like the windows search system whereby it indexes everything and makes searching for files of all types incredibly fast. I really like the way photos and media is handled. I like the inclusion of windows media centre in the home premium edition.

What I like most is that you can move folders such as My Documents. You could do this on previous versions too, but this time you can also move your My Pictures, Music folders etc, to where they actually exist. If you keep these on separate partitions like I do this feature is super useful.

Windows did recognise all the main hardware and installed the drivers. A few minor hardware wasn’t recognised but I was easily able to find drivers. Win 7 uses the same driver model as vista so finding and installing vista drivers is acceptable and won’t cause any issue.

The cost is one aspect which I don’t fully like. I wish it was a little less. I’m hoping they will take a leaf out of apples book and start selling there OS closer to $30 but we can hope.

Should you rush out and upgrade ? if you’re on Vista then I think you definitely should. If you’re on XP with a newish pc and you feel up to the challenge of moving then go for it. If your PC is ageing a little I’d say hold out a little while, prices are sure to drop and also due to the sheer amount of XP users Microsoft have been forced into support XP for another couple of years.

Obviously I believe all what I wrote until I actually get one. Then it will be screw you guys, I have a phone that oWn3z which is better than thou. So I can look kewl like this guy in the picture Steve Jobless. Too busy to have a shave cos I’d be checking out all the kewl features of the iPhone, the sexy screen transitions the way the apps load and how I can browse the web and google maps. But more importantly how I can instantly be kewler than you just because I have one of these.

What’s funnier is I saw a girl on youtube using her new 3G iPhone calling up Apple stores around the US asking if they have an iPhone from her iPhone. Just to be put on hold and being told by every store that sorry we either have none, or we have some but judging by the size of the queue we won’t have any spare. All this whilst filming herself. Just to rub it in. To show she has an iPhone and you don’t and none of the stores have any either incase you was thinking of running out and getting one.

I have something which is more eye opening than this. Kewl guy Elton aka http://www.walkingleaf.co.uk has a freaking iPhone. He, as to this date not blogged about it, not made a video of himself pretending to talk into it. Maybe I’m missing the point isn’t the point of getting an iPhone that you at least blog, facebook and youtube yourself with it. Even the jobless guy up there is posing with his.

Its the sort of case whereby you could be in a watch shop and someone mentions ‘time’. It doesn’t matter to you that that they are watches freaking everywhere even a clock next to your face. All time is now irrelevant. You slide out your leather pouch, slide out the iPhone, do the slidey thing on the phone to unlock it, then press the time button, which pops up a clock showing the real time. Then proceed to say the time out loud, whilst smiling and showing the phone to everyone around so loudly and bold so people can say, ‘wow you have an iPhone!’.

"Yes b!tches, I do!".

Thats what having an iPhone is all about trust me! I now these things. I’ve seen it happen.

To make it work for windows you need two dll files which you can download and save to your dr divx installed path
http://www.matroska.org/~robux4/drdivx/

Dr Divx was made open source earlier this year by divx.com and is an application which you can use to convert video into divx files simply and easily.