Sunday, August 30, 2009

Windows 7: Best OS upgrade experience ever!

Windows-7-Upgrade-Chart-Unveiled-2

Despite the known chart, upgrading my notebook to Windows 7 was a great and easy experience. As some of you already know my notebook came with Microsoft Vista installed which I uninstalled after some time of work with it. (here’s my post about that)

Having Windows 7 installed at work I decided to go ahead and install it on my notebook.

Two things surprised me, first of all, the installer gave me the option to upgrade (which is not supported according to the chart). I didn’t take that option since I wanted to have a clean install but it was there, I don’t know what’d happened if I’d clicked it. And the second surprising thing was how fast it was… really, I didn’t time it cause it is one of those things you expect to take hours… and it probably did, but it seemed fast and almost “enjoyable”.

And one more cool thing. While I was installing it told me I had a previous Windows installed and since I didn’t choose to upgrade everything was going to be named Windows.old, I wouldn’t be able to run that windows installation but all the files would be there, and to my surprise that folder not only contained the previous Windows folder but also the program files and user settings. I found that really helpful cause you don’t always remember what programs to install after a clean up, so I now I have the old folder there.

I just read that the Windows.old folder was available on Vista :S
I guess that what you get when your product gives a first really bad impression (Vista).

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Saturday, August 15, 2009

Bing vs. Google

phpThumb_generated_thumbnailjpg It’s been quite a while since my latest post, and I encountered myself many times thinking I should blog about this and then for some reason I didn’t do it. So now I decided to stop for a minute (actually I’m waiting for the build) and write about this search engine ‘war’ we’re in the middle of.

At the red corner we have Google which does not need any further presentation, and on the blue corner we have Bing. Some time ago Microsoft came out with bing I decided to give it a try, but really give it a try setting it as my default search engine in my browsers. I decided to try it cause I found the design of the site pretty cool. There are tons of feature that I don’t get to use cause I’m not in the US, so I can’t search for the closest pizza place to where I am right now… but there a few other features that got my attention, for instance, no need to go thru pages when searching for images, just scroll down. Also, when searching for videos, you get a tiny screenshot of the video which you can play from the bing site itself.

All that it’s pretty neat, but, does it find what I’m looking for? mm mmm… well, not in the order I expected them. For instance, I use the search engines a lot to find solutions to error messages I get while programming. I also use them to find the members of a class I need to use… so, if I search for a class, I expect the msdn site to be at top and in bing that does not always happen, while it does with Google.

I guess Google’s page rank it is still a little better… and while bing is still a beta, I expect those results to come out right…

One point to microsoft though, I’m searching for stuff that belong to them and their own sites don’t show up on top, which means their algorithm is not as good as it should yet but they are not doing anything (they could) to show their sites on top…

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