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Not having vast amounts of money to play with, I have to plan carefully ahead for things and take advantage of “special deals” as they arise because there are absolutely no prizes for spending more money than you need for anything ! As I mentioned previously on this blog, because of getting involved with 7 during the public beta testing, I got an email from MS when pre-ordering went live and therefore will get my copies at a considerable discount.

However and for those interested in such things, I thought that I might outline my other preparations for the arrival of this O/S and my reasoning. I will not be too technical so perhaps some comments may be of use to those who are not at all.

I Have a Number of PCs

The fact that I have more than one PC really goes back to when I was earning my living in IT. Although a Project Manager rather than a pure “Techie” or Programmer, most of the stuff I dealt with was based on client and server applications and having the ability to “play” on my own home network gave me the experience and “feel” to make real world decisions in the workplace.

As a rule, I always have a general purpose PC, its the one you use for email, web browsing, writing letters and running a few, to you, crucial programmes, this doesn’t need to be a powerful machine. When working, the general purpose PC would tend to be a laptop because it meant that I could take “my whole world” with me as I travelled from site to site or even abroad. These days and although I have a laptop, my GP machine is a desktop PC simply because they are more powerful and upgradable compared to a laptop.

Roll Your Own

When I first got involved seriously in IT, I used to build my own PCs from components because it was cheaper and more flexible when it came to upgrading them. However and as I came more established and busy, I switched to buying PCs from Dell and Hewlett Packard, my current laptop is the Chinese company Lenovo who do the IBM hardware.

However, since moving to Somerset, I have reverted to “building my own” again which is quite fun and also very flexible because change whilst on-going in a sense, is very economical with the majority of components being recycled which means, lighter on the wallet.

Although I set out to reduce my PCs to two workstations and a laptop, I have failed and ended up with 4, a laptop and a Server. One of the things that I had forgotten from my previous experiences of building my own was that as you upgraded to newer of better technology, you inevitably ended up with displaced components which in the end, add up to a whole, although not cutting edge, working PC. It wasn’t a problem then, I just gave them away to family and friends, today not so easy, everybody who wants one, has one !

Back to Windows 7

When I took part in the public beta which was fun, I bought in a cheap quad motherboard with memory and put the unit inside a case I had so that I could play with it to destruction and it wouldn’t matter. As Microsoft wanted you to run all your usual applications and report back any problems, it also meant that I could overload the PC with everything, not something I would normally do.

I have three main interest areas all of which use a fair amount of computing power, Photography, Video/3D and web based programming and design and whilst it is possible to run all those applications on one PC, I don’t, each gets its own dedicated PC although they can all share the same data stores and printers. The reason for working this way is to reduce the clutter on each PC so that it runs better also, I can only work on one PC at a time and for that matter, one main task so I only normally run one PC at a time, why waste power ?

Anyway, on the test PC with everything loaded, Windows 7 worked well with very few glitches all of which were eradicated by the time the RC or Release Candidate came out, it is a good O/S.

Upgrade

My test rig has proved useful so rather than trash it I decided to upgrade it. Over the past few months I picked up a better motherboard and another hard drive so during this week, I will upgrade the hardware ready for the full version that should arrive by the end of this or, the beginning of next week.

In a Corporate IT Department where you have 100s or 1,000s of PCs to look after, apart from an original, no one does a manual build on a PC because it takes hours by the time you install each application and then patch it with the latest updates so what you have are “disk images” for each model that contains the lot and can be used to image a PC in minutes, all you have to do then is set up the user’s email a security profile and job done.

Whilst at home it is possible to do a variation on this, it is not quite as slick so my approach is based upon backing up my data first and foremost. A clean bare metal install of Windows I like because you leave all the clutter behind and as I restrict the number of applications per PC, reinstalling the programmes is not a grind, get bored, do the next PC tomorrow.

Footnote

I now have Windows 7 RC installed on 3 PCs and the Release Candidate version which was free to download will run until next Spring but whilst I will take advantage of that on one PC until I install Linux on it, I will be happy to have got my main network back and settled down on Windows 7 so that I can get back to working on my projects.