In the last few days, I was inundated with many new ideas and new gadgets. I was struggling to find the time to review information and write about them. I hope I can do this before the freshness wane off.

I am most grateful that my work horse laptop has gotten an upgrade. Over the last year the performance of my 3 year old Lenovo has deteriorated to an unusable level, probably due to a combination hardware and software issues. It was long over due for an upgrade. The replacement was a high end model, with 4GB RAM, SSD drive and Windows 7 OS.

The first impression, many operations are dramatically faster than its predecessor. For example, Excel takes just 1 second to launch, compares to 15 seconds in hold laptop. Bringing the laptop to sleep and then awake is also noticeably faster. Of course other people may have experience a less dramatic boost if their baseline performance wasn't as bad as my pathetic old laptop.

My company was sticking with Windows XP, skipping Vista, before finally upgrading to Windows 7. Windows 7 seems to be a good improvement so far. There is a badly needed system search function. Finally my outlook mail is searchable. The interface has undergone some changes. The taskbar becomes more like Mac's dock. Another change is better security. Installing program or writing to the registry will trigger a dialog requesting for administrator privilege. This may also cause problem in some older programs. For example, if a program simply writes its data into its program directory, it is considered a protected area. The write will fail unless the program can acquire special privilege.

I've spend more than one day reinstalling software and transferring data to the new machine. I pass using the data migration program offered our company's IT and opt to do most of this manually instead. I believe a lot of performance issues that I've been seeing has to do with the ...

(This is found in my draft folder and posted in 2016. Original date is estimated)

2010.05.20 comments