Thursday, November 07, 2013



Tech Trans


So, today's the day I finally left WinXP behind. The free Win7 upgrade (pushed into a partition) didn't make me; hearing about the end of support for XP didn't make me; but now we're developing some Windows library and I figure it's pretty foolish to keep coding and testing on XP, which until today was what my main development PC ran on.

Come to think of it, when XP first came out, I also stuck to Win2K for quite some time. When I first upgraded to XP, I still set the look to Classic. All those square edges looked much neater to me. =D Now, though, they just look old-fashioned. (Or maybe it's the colour?) Which goes to show it was all inertia...

Anyway, I just spent the last few hours installing and configuring stuff on the Win7 partition. It wasn't so daunting as I've installed a number of programs since the actual OS upgrade a long time ago, and some of the other programs can still be run from the XP drive. Migrating Outlook used to be what I hated most about changing systems at school or work, but it's quite easy now that we use Exchange; almost everything stays at the server.

Another recent abandonment, an unwilling one, was iGoogle. This is a greater loss! Now nothing is forcing glimpses of daily news and trivia on me. I checked out a few recommended replacements, but I wasn't motivated enough to create a new account for any of them*. I resorted to bookmarking Google News and Chrome Apps, but then I rarely remember to click on them. -_-0

* It was kind of a wake-up call too, of how much of my online life was hinging on Google and its convenient synchronize feature. Dangerous!

Ah, the nature of technology. Moving on...


[Edit:] I forgot to update that I have since managed to get my paws on The Long War. NLB, you're awesome. (我們永遠支持你!)

[Edit II:] The Long War turned out a rather tedious reading for me, though. =( I ended up not finishing it.