Getting used to Windows7.

It all started out with when Microsoft announced they’re offering a discount for post-secondary students. What was the discount? Getting Windows7 Home Premium for 39.99CND. The only criteria was to provide a valid student email directly associated with the university/college they’re in. Basically, you have to provide your student email, and if you get a reply from them, you’re eligible on the spot; and that was the case for me. Not only that, I didn’t have to get Home Premium. There was a little sentence in fine print containing a URL to get Windows7 Professional instead with no extra charge. Fucking awesome.

Without hesitation, I bought it for that price right away and they gave me a Product key with the download URL to Windows7. It wasn’t an ISO, it was one giant EXE file. That being said, I was pretty stoked that I had received such an awesome offer to Windows7 (Professional to boot) considering I was on the verge of spending about $120+ on Windows7 Home Premium.

Needless to say, It took several hours for me to get Windows7 installed and after the whole process finished, I started to think otherwise. This version of Windows feels so complicated. Maybe it’s because I’ve been using a near-primitive OS for too long and the transition from XP to 7 was way too much for me. I can only assume that those that transitioned from Vista to 7 didn’t have as much of a problem adapting to Windows7. XP to 7, on the other hand, is a fucking nightmare.

Adaptability aside, there are some few gripes I have with Windows 7 now that it’s my 3rd day using it. Some factors, I might have to blame the PC and some others, I’ll have to completely blame the OS for the flaws.

Windows Live Messenger: Okay, this is starting to piss me off. I miss the times when the Messenger icon was on the bottom right corner of the taskbar. This isn’t the case in Windows7, whenever you click on the [x] on the main Live Messenger Window, it won’t minimize to the bottom-right corner anymore. Instead, it will minimize to the bottom left alongside all the other windows you have open. The more annoying part is when you try to close the minimized icon there, it’ll shut down the program entirely, signing you off. Recap: If you want to stay on messenger, that minimized icon stays with your other opened windows/programs. Forever. Way to make Live Messenger such a major inconvenience.

Windows Media Player 12: Oh my god, it’s fucking horrible. I can’t emphasize enough how terrible it is. The terrible UI doesn’t even come close to all the other problems I’ve encountered with the player. If you have an extensive collection of over 14,500+ songs like I do, you don’t ever want to turn on shuffle. Ever. I have no idea what the hell they’ve done to the player, but every time you try to hit PREV / NEXT, it will take between 25-30 seconds between every fucking song just for the next song to load. This shouldn’t happen. Even WMP11 and prior releases had better loading (read: instant) for moving on to another song on shuffle. Another gripe I’ve had with WMP12 is that they have removed the ability to minimize the player onto the bottom right segment of the taskbar (Mini Mode). Why the hell would you remove such a great feature?! It was one of the prime reasons why I loved WMP to begin with, and now the only thing that made WMP awesome is gone now. Unacceptable. One more gripe that pisses me off to no end: I’m really sick of having WMP restore itself to its non-minimized state whenever I open a new MP3 file via Windows Explorer. It’s fucking annoying. Why won’t you fucking stay minimized when I want to open a MP3 file? Unless Microsoft releases a good enough patch to fix all of the above nuisances, back to Winamp I go.

That’s all I can think of at the moment. It’s only my 3rd day of using Windows 7. Bear with me. I'll probably go bitch some more about it when I find other things in the OS that’s worth bitching about. The only thing I really like about Windows 7 so far is the ability to automatically change wallpapers at a set interval, ranging from every 10 seconds to every 24 hrs (1 day). I can finally put my Touhou Project wallpapers to use. All of them.