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What A Difference An Operating System Makes

What a difference an operating system makes. As you may know, I bought a new laptop recently (a blue one). It uses Windows 7. My old computer uses (used?) Windows Vista. Ah well, I thought, what difference does the operating system make? Answer: even if all you are doing is working on word processing and surfing the net (and writing infrequent blog posts), it makes a huge heck of a difference. The problem, I think, is that it is so close to my old one in many ways that the differences really tend to stand out.

Oh, but I sure as heck did think that I would love 7. That snap feature, for example. Oh, how great it would be to be able to look back and forth from one document to the next. Ah, yes, it would be. If, for example, either of the documents were large enough to see clearly when I snap them. I tend to find that even with a wide screen monitor my wee aging eyes are not good enough to see text without making it large enough that there is a whole lot of scrolling going on. Up. Down. Over to the left. Over to the right. Perhaps if I had sprung for the massive screen, it would be different. As I did not, I tend to find myself flipping back and forth just as much as I ever did with my old laptop.

I also find this whole new way of lining up items along the bottom to be annoying. Sure, I may have multiple Internet windows open at once. Even now I have this window, Facebook and Ploked.com up and running and it is organized so that tabs are not spread willy-nilly across the bottom of my screen. But the problem is getting my computer to realize which window I want to maximize. It tends to flip back and forth and I end up fuming and saying words I cannot write in a G-rated blog. Perhaps there are ways to fix this but being as I am a low tech girl in a high tech world, I do not know what those things are.

That being said, there are many things I like about my new laptop. I love the fact that it turns on and boots up fully when I turn it on (oh how easily I am amused). I like the fact that it seems to be a good deal faster than my old one. I also like the fact that the keys are not so worn down that I need to take dictation (inside joke). But I am not sure that the OS is one of them.

I suppose that time will tell. I'll keep you posted.
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