Like many Windows users, I’ve avoided Vista so far. But its matured, I know it has, and its time to give it a chance. Windows 7 is just round the corner and is expected to take the best bits of Vista and make them better.
Anyway, I’m planning to create a little miniblog on my upgrade of my system. It will be long (possibly even as long as a year) as I upgrade the OS, computer hardware and migrate all my software (something like 800Gb of it).
On Friday night, I upgraded Cubase 3SX to Cubase 5 on my old machine. Installation was a breeze on my old system and it works surprisingly well. Some offline processes are a tad slower than in SX, but it opens my old Cubase songs with no big hit in performance. I think I’m already ready to put Cubase 3 to bed. I’ll keep it there just in case, but it looks like 5 will work for me.
This afternoon, I have installed Windows 7 RC on an old drive. I need to do something safer long term to make t his work for me – right now, it’s open case, drive sitting on the case, unsecured. I should take a picture. I’m sure it’ll make someone cringe! But it was important to me to be able to boot back into XP for real work. Once again, I’m surprised at how good my computer is running with Windows 7. No noticeable screen lag with all the fancy stuff – it certainly doesn’t feel as though my computer is dragging or struggling. I’m going to put Cubase on next and then I’ll probably take off the fancy display elements off Win7 to give me a little boost in performance. I’m really used to Windows classic and don’t mind going back to it. One thing that I’m not so keen on with Windows 7 so far is the task bar. It looks so much bigger than XP’s. I want to keep as much screen real estate as possible, and I wish I could be using the XP sized task bar. Maybe there’s a setting… I can’t find it!
Installation of Windows 7 was a breeze by the way. Something I’d expect from OSX, but not really so much from Microsoft. This is great news. The only thing that surprised me a little was that my Focusrite Saffire drivers didn’t install automatically. But I downloaded Vista drivers and they work just fine. Not even really sure why I expected them to install automatically.
I ran Windows 7 for the afternoon and no crashes. Thats good too. Since I don’t have much in the way of software on there, there’s not a whole lot to go wrong, but still, its a good sign. Very encouraging.
One problem that I’ve discovered is that my CME keyboard is not compatible with Vista (and therefore with Windows 7). From the looks of their official forum, it never will be. It’s not a show stopper – the keyboard cost less than $150 including delivery from somewhere out West. But its a shame, because as bad as CME are as a company – the lowest of the low in fact, the key action of this keyboard is really nice, and it has some nice features like the breath controller input. I guess its something else to take to the landfill though when the new computer arrives.