Looks More Like a Puma

Having completed my backup and burned a dvd with the win7 iso, my next step was to create a hd partition to install windows on. Booting from an Ubuntu flash drive and adding the extra partition with gparted worked great. It was time for the riskiest step.

I put in the Windows  dvd and booted it.

The install process was actually not a pain in the rear. Microsoft even sprung for some  aesthetic dialogs and progress bars. It did not take too  long before I was running Windows 7.

Of course Microsoft still has no respect for other operating systems, so it scrapped my boot menu in favor of assuming I would always want Windows. Getting this fixed turned out to be quite a pain. It was quite easy to find instructions for restoring grub; unfortunately none of them worked. Finally I discovered the super grub disk. Its menus were certainly confusing, and I’m still not sure exactly what I did, but it seems to have worked.
So, as I write this blog entry with Chrome in Windows 7, there’s a few  things that have jumped out at me about the new os.

• I click on the wireless icon, and I get a list of available wireless networks. How natural…
• Fast boot
• It took me a long time to figure out how to open more than one instance of the file explorer.
• It still astonishes me to install an os that only fits on a dvd, and when I’m done the only useful program is IE (which I replaced anyway)

Well it was a fun project, and now I have a windows to fiddle with in my spare time.