Last night was the release of Windows 7. I’ve been running the release candidate (actually the Enterprise Trial Edition) for over a month now, and frankly, it’s been amazing. It’s fast, easy to use and hasn’t really caused me much grief, which is more than I can say about previous Vista installations. Since I still have a .EDU email address, I signed up to get a copy of Windows 7 Professional for a whopping $30. After putting in my credit card number and getting an email this morning with my Key, I start looking into what it’s going to take to change my Enterprise Edition over to the new fanciness that is Professional Edition… That’s when I found out the bad news. Apparently, since my copy is for “evaluation” only… I have no way to change the version or to put in a new key. I am going to have to do a fresh install. Now… I wouldn’t care so much about that if I didn’t just get the damn thing tuned up, working flawlessly and doing everything that I needed it to do. It’s REALLY friggin’ annoying. I suppose that’s the price you pay for installing free software and not reading the fine print. I’m going to have to back up my whole damn computer and get this process started. Not looking forward to it, but at least I have next week where I’ll be working from home to make the switch while still having my desktop up and operational. Seeing as how I installed the same damn thing on my computer at home, I think it may be time to just wipe out everything and start fresh with both computers. Not really my idea of a good time, but having fresh, fast and clean computers is essential to making my work days productive.

Speaking of productivity, this week has been miserable. We’re in a “Go-Live” situation, and it’s been running smooth as silk, which NEVER happens. That being said, I’ve been tremendously bored. Don’t know what to do with myself. Oh well. The one thing that’s really fallen off in the past year is my desire to use my camera. I don’t know what’s been causing the decline in usage, but I’ve hardly picked the thing up. I think that some of that has to do with the PITA that it’s been to work with the pictures on my desktop, but that’s going to have to change. I’ve been looking into various NAS devices or even Media PC’s that could work as a remote file storage. I’ve not yet decided what I really want to do as of yet, but I really want to have a media PC that will take backups of both my and Melissa’s computer in addition to playing Blu-Rays, games, and hosting all of my media in an accessible location. I don’t care if it does any of the DVR fanciness, as I am using the AT&T U-Verse package, which has been great, so it really is going to act as storage.

I’ll be looking into it more as the week moves on. Anyway…time to start thinking about lunch.