After cursing over Window 7 for more than a year, I’ve finally formatted the disk and installed my beloved Windows XP instead. I needed to borrow an external CD drive to do that because the machine didn’t want to boot XPÂ setup from a USB stick (but Ubuntu can boot from USB… weird).
Windows 7 is nice and all, but some things are just plain stupid. It’s no longer possible to show underlined letters for keyboard navigation. Why-oh-why was it necessary to remove that ability? What harm does it do to show users how they could speed up their work?
Oh well – welcome back, ye goode olde XP. This is going to run faster on my little machine.
Windows XP takes up less than 5GB, and that’s including Service Pack 3 and all other updates since 2001 until today.
Office XP takes up only 218MB (megabytes!), instead of the >2GB of Office 2010, although I admit that I deselected Clippy because even ex-Microsofties can’t stand that annoyingly well-meaning piece of virtual wire.
Before you ask – yes, I’ve also tried Linux as an alternative to Windows 7. I used Ubuntu, and I liked it a lot. Nearly my only gripe with it is that the office suite isn’t quite up to par, but it’s close. But the real reason I didn’t switch completely is that I never found a tool-set to replace cam2pc (for downloading and renaming photos and videos) and Picasa (for uploading to my albums).
The best candidate to replace cam2pc is the excellent Rapid Photo Downloader – except that I could never get it to work with my iPhone, but I hope to replace it with an Android phone soon(ish).
Picasa does exist for Linux, but only as a Windows app wrapped in a Linux package. It’s an old version and it does not support videos, especially not videos made with the iPhone. I need Picasa because nothing else works properly with my Picasa online albums.
So because I’ve got two small kids, photos are important to me. Because photos are important to me, I’ve got to use Windows. And if I’ve got to use Windows, I choose XP.
But I’ll keep an Ubuntu partition as well. Maybe I can switch to that when I’ve replaced my phone.