Fortunately, the Overidon Laptop is up and running again! Big thanks to Device Repair for replacing the hard drive and installing Windows 7. They did a great job. Now I am running Windows 7 and it is quite faster than Windows Vista on this computer. One thing that I noticed is that Windows 7 uses these interesting transparent windows. When I click on the Start Button it looks pretty similar to Vista except that the right hand side of the window is translucent and I can see the window behind it. It is a really nice perk because you always have an idea of what you’re looking at. Also when I hover the icons on the taskbar, I can see small previews of the programs that are running. So when I hover over the Mozilla Firefox icon, I can see this post that I’m writing right now, and also my Facebook page. And I can easily select which window I want to view. Minimizing and maximizing and restoring windows is much easier now. By simply dragging the top of a window to the top of the screen, Windows automatically thinks that I want to maximize. It’s pretty amazing and very intuitive.
In order to get the wireless working again since I forgot my wireless password, I had to hard-reset my router. The router came with this graphically intense software for the Linksys. I remember when we first set it up, it took literally over an hour to install and configure the software, maybe even two hours. But this time I didn’t even have to install the software from the CD in order to get it to work. The router came with built in, web based software that I was able to access by being plugged into the thing and entering 192.168.1.1 into my browser. It didn’t take long at all to get back online. And this time I made sure to keep the wireless password information in a place where I remember.
It’s going to take a while to install all the software that I had originally on this laptop. But at least now I have a 500 gig hard drive to store data. Before I only had a 150 gig hard drive and that was barely enough. I’m not exactly sure how my old hard drive got bad sectors. But I am going to make sure to back up my data often in order to avoid problems.
