Quick update to prove I’m not dead yet…
With all the fake online reports of celebrities deaths following the series of famous bucket-kickers recently (too insensitive?) I thought I better pop up here and dispel any rumours that might have started that I am dead! I’m not dead! I’m not even famous!
Anyways… I just have been quite busy with study, church, life in Japan, and so my blog here has fell into a little bit of a lag!
Something at the more geeky end of things, I have recently reformatted my computer. Since coming to Japan I have done a fair bit of installing and uninstalling to try things and test things that might have proven useful but maybe didn’t etc and that ended up clogging my system up a little bit, not a great deal, but a little bit. So I thought I’d clean up and start fresh!
Now Sony put Windows, drivers, etc on a seperate partition then you make the discs from that and can recover the space if you like, which I did, well rather installed Win 7 beta, then the release candidate, on it.
So self-made recovery discs in hand, backups safely made and verified and mentally prepared for a few hours of offline life as my computer is rebuilt I set about reinstalling. So I went ahead and booted on the recovery discs, formatted the drive and began the Vista install sequence. Everything was going well until I got to disc 2 of the 3 recovery discs and after a lot of whirring it stopped reading and the install was aborted! The disc came out of the drive and under close inspection it had a bit of a scratch on the surface that was causing the problem!
What to do? Clean hard disk, no recovery partition, dud recovery dvds and no second computer to fiddle with things through… I did the only thing I could, I installed Windows 7 Release Candidate as my main operating system! (for those who don’t know, Win7 RC is the pre-release, final check over of Windows 7 before it is officially released in October, just to make sure it works and catch any major last minute bugs).
So thats the end of it really, I’m running Windows 7 Ultimate on my Sony effectively… Its running exceptionally well, certainly as well as Vista had become after legions of patches and updates, and much leaner. The interface changes are welcome, making the taskbar a bit more docky (but in a good way, leaving out the irritating bits of OSX’s dock and keeping the useful bits of the Windows taskbar…)
So yeah, Sony said I’d have to pay 50-odd Euro to get some new UK recovery discs sent to me (well sent to NI, then more to ship here…) So with the offer on Windows 7 for $50 in the US, £50 seems likely in the UK, I might just go on ahead and go for Win 7 instead of worrying about Vista… I still have my Vista key and can easily get my hands on a DVD to get the upgrade. Failing that I might just get my hands on the DVD and use my vista key to go back to vista. I mean really Sony can’t get away with charging me for software I already own can they?!
So there it is, I’m still alive and running Windows 7…
Tags: alive, dead, microsoft, RC, recovery, sony, vista, Win 7, win7, win7 RC, windows, windows 7
