Ahmad

Yes, I am asking you.  I have friends who have lost their jobs.  I am happy just to have mine.  I really love my job, and not just for the sake that I have one, but much more because I really enjoy the times when I feel like I am doing it well, and I find that with focus, I can find myself doing it well more and more often.

It feels good.  That must be what it feels like to be President Obama.  I know he has fans out the wazzoo and I am just like any of the others:

• I think it is simply not in him to lie
• I think it is simply not in him to cheat
• I think it is simply not in him to be rude
• I think it is simply not in him to be anything but charitable

I admit that’s a lofty set of attributes to pin on just the one guy.  But I guess the thing is I don’t see him as just the one guy.  He is all of us who know that when we stand together, we’re stronger than all of us combined.  We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.  He’s motivated me to be a better person, and he motivates me to be a better American.

Although I thought the Super Bowl got really interesting at the end of the 4th quarter, I just didn’t walk away from it thinking it had been one of the best games of all time.  Imagine my surprise to hear it being discussed as if it were.  I mean, really?  It was that good?  For one thing, I didn’t have a dog in that fight.  I guess I prefer the Steelers’ owner’s politics to the Cardinals’ owner’s.  But really?  I prefer Kurt Warner to Big Ben and since the Cardinals were the underdogs, we had decided to cheer for the underdogs.  When they took the lead in the fourth quarter, it got exciting for a minute or two right up until they lost it.  And then they lost it.

It was largely a pooper bowl for me.

I was digging through my stuff in the office today and came across an old Compaq Evo n800W that I used to run Windows XP on in early 2003, or maybe it was 2004 – I can’t remember.

I decided to put Windows 7 on it, just to see how far back in time I could really go with it.  The video hardware can’t do Aero Glass.  That was the only problem I had with it.  I couldn’t run the mouse down to the lower right corner and have all my windows turn clear so I could see the desktop.  That’s it.  That’s all I lost.

It boots fast, runs faster than it used to since I had a 7200 RPM drive in it.  It was a useful computer, but I stopped using it when I got the Tablet, which I guess may have been mid-2005.  This thing (I am using it right now) really sings with Windows 7.  There was one tiny little workaround I had to do since the DVD ISO image doesn’t have the driver for the ATI Mobile Radeon video card or the Compaq Wireless 200.  I stuck a PC-card wireless card into the slot and it came right up after installation but resolution was a little low.  However, Windows update had the updated drivers for the video and wireless device, so I took the PC-card wireless out, and it was up and running.  All I missed out on was Aero Glass, but it’s not as if the computer was ever supposed to do that.  It looks a lot like XP, but it works a lot better!

When I had tried to install Vista on it (the reason it went into the drawer, however unfair to the hardware that might seem), I couldn’t get it to boot from the DVD.  So that makes me wonder – why was it like that?  Why can Windows 7 go back and work on hardware that Vista couldn’t work on?  Why didn’t we do this IN Vista?  I guess I will never know, however, I am really glad we’re doing it IN Windows 7.

I think I have a really old Dell laptop in the closet.  I think I got it in 1995.  I wonder what will happen :-)

Yeah, I’m a geek.  But really, it’s pretty cool and it’s rock solid and for the next 180 days or so, it’s FREE.  It will bring new life to your old computers.  It won’t tie your shoes or slice your bread, but it will remind you of why you first thought computers were cool PLUS the speed and stability are really impressive (not just for a beta, but really impressive PERIOD).

It’s not just that the navigation is so much better.  Yes, the new navigation makes it faster to do things you want to do and it remembers the last set of documents you used in each application that’s open as well as the most recent folders you’ve opened.  That’s cool, but it’s not just that.  It’s that the same hard disk, processor, RAM and graphics card that you had seem to run faster, as if by magic.  Programs come up faster.  Internet Explorer is faster.  Booting takes less time.  Shutting down takes less time.  Everything takes less time.  For example, my old (older than three years) Toshiba Tecra M4 that I have recently been using to hold my door open because it didn’t do anything else terribly well now boots to the login screen in less than 7 seconds, and logging in takes 10 seconds.  It took two minutes to get to the login with Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, and another two minutes before I could do anything after logging in.  The same hardware now gives me back over 4 and a half minutes of my life every time I go to do something with the computer.  I had to manually install the wireless network driver (Intel 2915 driver using older driver model wasn’t in the box).  That was the only trouble I had.  I am about to go even further back in time and try my old Dell Inspiron from 2003.  Maybe it was 2002.

Windows Media Player 12 and Internet Explorer 8 are crisp and responsive.  On this old (almost put it in the trash) computer, those two programs never did well.  I don’t know if it’s really tight drivers or what.  If that’s it, then shame on whomever for writing such crappy drivers, and good for whomever fixed it.  Who’s leading that charge?  Can they do it for other products, too?

Speaking of other products, I made the transition to the new Windows Live Essentials just before Christmas since I was snowed in and couldn’t go anywhere.  It’s a very nice set of maturing tools.  I found that Live Writer is still very simple but more sophisticated, and somehow (here’s that theme again) faster.  The same is true of Live Mail, Live Photo Gallery and Messenger.  Everything just felt more stable.  Putting that set of tools on Windows 7 really just adds to the feeling of speed and stability.  It all just works really well together.

I can’t remember the last time I was this excited about Windows.  A colleague and I were talking about that today and he took me all the way back to before “Chicago” released and how excited we all were that we were running cool looking new stuff (from Windows 3.11 – think about it) and when Windows NT 4 adopted the new UI, we were all just as excited.  It was in 1994 and 1995.  Since then, I’ve only known one person who was really living in the pre-release and didn’t care if he lost some productivity to filing bugs – he was helping make a better product, or so he thought.  Of course he also wasn’t getting his job done, and that was the end of that.  I am not saying it got him fired, mind you, just that it seemed to occupy a lot of his time.

But that’s really neither here nor there.  The fact is, this stuff has tremendous value, and you don’t have to buy a new computer to love it.  Of course if you do, then it will all be just that much cooler since you’ll likely have new faster and bigger processors, with equally fast and large RAM and hard drives.

Speaking of which, someone I know at work recently got a new computer and it came with a huge solid state hard disk.  There were no moving parts.  Windows 7 will be even faster on that, although how do you improve on stunningly fast?

Get it now!  And then put this on it.

Scientists today say that there is a 1 in 44,000 chance that an asteroid that is more than 1,000 feet across and millions of tons is going to hit the earth on April 13, 2036.

No need to save up for that retirement.