I wish all the readers of my blog a very Happy and a prosperous new year 2010. During the long weekend I ended up revamping my personal laptop with both hardware and software changes. I have a Lenovo 3000 N100 series laptop. Its been more than 3 years I have been using this. I assume that's a good amount of time for the battery life. My battery went off last week and had to be replaced. I was running this laptop with Windows XP Professional version and 1 GB RAM. Over the last 3 years many software's have been installed and the system had become really slow. Also my 20 GB C drive was almost full and I was continuously getting the low disk space warning from Windows.
I decided to upgrade the RAM and replaced one of the 512 MB chip with a 2 GB RAM. That boosted my memory to 2.5 GB from 1 GB. The battery was also replaced. I thought of reinstalling the operating system by formatting the hard disk. Off late I have been reading the blogs from Scott Hanselman and was influenced by his posts on Windows 7 operating system. I spent a day reading about the performance of Windows 7 compared to XP, the minimum hardware requirements, issues people had while installing fresh copy as against an upgrade etc etc. Most of the posts were encouraging and suggesting to try Windows 7.
Finally on Saturday morning I started the installation. I did not format the C drive as I had some useful software's on my XP OS. Instead I backed up the data from my other two drives and formatted both D and E drive. Installed the Windows 7 OS on D drive. It was a breeze. Took less than an half an hour and was a smooth install. There were very little choices to be made. Some of the settings like internet connection settings were automatically detected from Windows XP during installation and carried forward without any user intervention.
The performance also seems to be good. The UI looks similar to Vista in some regards but has many good features. I personally like the jump lists on the taskbar which show the preview of each window before switching over to it.
The only problem I faced was with the sound drivers. Windows 7 could not identify the correct sound drivers for my laptop. But it took not more than 15-20 minutes to find the right drivers on the net and get the sound working.
So far the overall experience has been EXCELLENT and I would recommend people to mover over to Windows 7 from XP or Vista operating system.
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