Starting with the bottom screenshot, here's the page that tells about the free upgrade for buyers of a new PC between now and October 22, when Windows 7 goes retail.In the top screenshot, I tried to show how the Windows 7 taskbar displays little icons, and what happens if you mouse-over one of them. If you look in the taskbar, you'll see an icon of a camera, which is my own icon for the program PhotoStudio. Immediately above that, you will see a small thumbnail view of its program. Clicking on that thumbnail view will enlarge it to the full window. I don't know if that's quite what happens on a Mac, but it's probably something close to it. The point I was trying to make the other day is that these various operating systems are gradually progressing toward a 'universal operating system' which will have the best features of its predecessors. And that wouldn't be a bad thing.
Certainly there might be a thing like a universal OS coming up at some time.
ReplyDeleteWhat you demonstrated works in a similar way on a Mac, where you have the "Dock" at the bottom of the screen, a collection of favourite programmes, their icons on a desk (in 3D), they open their attached programmes when you click on them.
I think we´re going to buy a SONY VGN-NS 31 Notebook for my wife, at 679 €. It has Vista installed on it though, I hope to upgrade to 7 later.
@ Monsieur Beep...
ReplyDeleteAbout the Vista on it - the first thing you should do with Vista is turn off the User Accounts Control,
so you will not be playing "20 questions" with it every time you try to do something. This is something we all learned the hard way. It was meant as a security enhancement, but it didn't do much except slow down the work.
In Windows 7, it's adjustable on a sliding scale from full on to off,
and that makes it a lot simpler.
You can pick how much of it, if any, you want, and it is better.
While going on about the icons in the taskbar of Windows 7, I forgot to mention that right-clicking on them brings up a little menu of other choices, like "pin this program to the taskbar" or "close window", or shows recent actions in it, such as in Windows Explorer.
ReplyDeleteIf you pin the program to the taskbar, then it stays in there until you unpin it, so you can keep it handy in much the same way as icons placed on the desktop, except that these won't get covered over if the desktop becomes full of windows.
You can also adjust the height of the taskbar, to make it twice as high, or move it to the top of the screen if you wish. When it is unlocked, right-clicking its upper edge will show a double-ended arrow with which you can drag that
top edge up one more thickness of it, to make it twice as high, or the opposite, if it already is larger than standard.
I think you'll enjoy Windows 7...
and you will have fun discovering all the improvements over your old Millennium Edition.
I´ve revived my old machine: I removed all things related to the internet (Antivirus, Firewall, Explorer), and the maschine starts up so much faster. I still keep using it to view pictures and do some writing.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for your friendly advice!
@ Monsieur Beep -
ReplyDeleteI'm a little worried about the part where you say you removed the anti-virus. If you go on-line with it at all, then you need that.
You can click here for the free version of Avast 4.8 (Home Edition)
which does a very nice job and it works on Windows 7 as well. I'm using it on this machine. It is automatically updated, and is a very good program. For the free version, look along the top of the page for 'FREE Software' and click on that in the heading.
I had had avast installed on my old machine, but the new versions wouldn´t work properly because of the limited RAM of 128 Mb or so ( twice Commodore 64 haha!!).
ReplyDeleteWell, not to worry, the machine is no longer connected to the outside world, it´ll spend the rest of its life behind thick monastery walls, hehe.
Of course is my Mac safeguarded with a Firewall and all that. I use my Mac and my iPod touch to surf the net.
I never go to dubious sites, never open unknown email attachments and so on. But even so...you can never be sure of some bad guys lurking...
...thanks for being so alert.
"thanks for being so alert"....
ReplyDeleteJust woke up from my afternoon nap!
At least your old computer is still running - mine decided last week to stop booting up, and it wouldn't even show the first screen of the process, so it isn't even getting past its first automatic self-test
before attempting to load Windows.
I took it to the shop, but haven't had any news on it yet. I suspect that it has probably bit the dust.
But one smart thing I did before that happened was that I bought an external hard-drive which is automatically programmed for making back-ups. I had just backed up the important folders on it before it quit. So if I have to junk it, I already have whatever I might want from it, stored on this new external drive. That's also handy for transferring that stuff onto this newest computer, instead of going into a special transfer process. The drive is now plugged into this machine, so I can read and recover all its files, and update those as needed.