Having been impressed with the demo at the recent Microsoft TechNet MSDN Roadshow here in Kota Kinabalu early September, I decided to install the freely-distributed Windows 7 RC installer on my just-repaired Acer Aspire One netbook almost immediately afterwards, and have been installing and testing many software almost non-stop since then.
I’m so psyched that Windows 7 performs as well as, if not better than, Windows XP! Not only were there no hardware and device conflict, but many of the software I used in XP is still compatible with 7! I’ll be honest and admit that there were very very small occasions where I encountered the dreaded BSOD, but those were entirely my fault since I installed certain software *cough virtualization cough* that were not compatible with my CPU, against Microsoft’s and Intel’s warnings, and again those errors were very few and far between.
As a blogger, my main concern was whether I’d still be able to use XAMPP and TortoiseSVN for my WordPress sandbox and plugin development, specifically for the Top Commentators Widget(TCW). Boy, am I glad they work on 7!
The screenshot above shows my Windows 7 desktop with the XAMPPLite program running Apache and MySQL. I’m also re-setting the TCW repository with TortoiseSVN to continue with my WordPress development, specifically the GEDCOM plugin and another plugin which will be simple but surprisingly useful – the latter will also be my first attempt at developing an AJAX-powered app.
So, yeah… I hope this lame excuse is enough of a good reason for the lack of posting in this blog 🙂
BTW, I’m typing this post via Windows Live Writer (which is bundled with the free Windows Live Essentials if you’re wondering how to get it). If this program screws up with the formatting, then this will be the last time I’ll be using WLW, otherwise I’ll be sticking to this as long as there are no better decent and free offline blog editor that comes along. I’m currently not using ScribeFire, since Mozilla Minefield doesn’t support it yet (yeah, don’t install FireFox on Windows 7, it’s very unstable).
Hope to do more posts concerning my WordPress plugins and Windows 7 experience soon.
Check out my other posts: « The Cracked LCD screen of my Acer Aspire One netbook / A blog aggregator admin’s dilemma »