New toys – in the software sense. I purchased a Win XP ungrade for my PC and installed it last night. I’ve been running Win98SE since 2000. When my PC was stolen in, oh I don’t know – 2001, I just had my original OS installed on the new machine to save the extra Microsoft charge. So it’s been a long time coming.
The upgrade was mostly straightforward, though time consuming. If I’d realized I might not have started it at the hour I did. I guess my brain wasn’t functioning too well and I took the claim that the upgrade would preserve my files a little too literally and failed to back anything up. Complete doofus. Most of my drive was left intact, but all of my historical email records got nuked. Oh well, maybe it was time to let some of those old conversations pass into posterity.
Anyhow, the upgrade was motivated by a couple of things – my PC has been desparately unstable for ages and the constant reboots have been driving me nuts. And there have been a couple of pieces of software I wanted to install that weren”t supported by Win98, notably Google Earth and ipodder. Both work fine now, and I’m really happy with them. I downloaded my first podcasts this morning and listened in the car on the way to my 8am meeting in Libertyville.