Last night as I was trying to fight the after effects of jet lag (thanks to my 28-hour door to door journey from Chicago to KL), I saw that Steve Jobs has indeed released Lion and it was available in it's new form which was a downloadable update via the App Store. I am for one, am glad that the update came in the form of the App Store and it was easily downloadable. All I needed to do was fire up my Unifi connection and then download the package.

Now this was a huge difference from my experience about two weeks back when my home PC decided to die on me after a good 6 years (yes, the motherboard failed on me) and I decided to rebuild a whole new PC. Together with that set up, I bought a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit and the whole process of installing everything again took a good long day. What I didn't mention was that the guy at Compu-Zone was trying to figure out why the DVD writer driver couldn't be detected. After troubleshooting almost every component in the PC, the fault laid with the power supply.

What I am trying to point out is that, even with my old Macbook Pro 2008 model, the whole installation was fast and easy. It took me around 20-30 minutes to download Lion, and another 20 minutes to install it over my existing Snow Leopard installation. At the end of the day, I was very impressed and more so impressed by the price tag. USD$29,90 for the entire Operating System. I just paid like RM400 for my copy of Windows 7 and yet Apple has done it again with it's low price.

By the time the installation was completed, I managed to fiddle around with the new OS and the two most impressive thing that I enjoyed was Launchpad and Mission Control. Definitely a good way or sorting out my Apps, previously I would always curse trying to find out apps which I installed but totally forgotten about. Unfortunately for me as well, I can't utilize multi gestures due to the fact that my Macbook Pro was made in the dinosaur ages hence that is one thing I have yet to experience.

Perhaps a new Macbook Air might do the trick but as much as I would love one of those, I really can't justify the need for one.

 

 

 

 

To be completely honest, I have a desktop sitting at home which serves me more as a multimedia device. Its exactly almost 3 years old running on an old Core Duo processor at 2.13Ghz. Previously it has been running on Windows Vista Home Premium edition and I never had any issues with it because I hardly use the machine for any serious work. This is until Starcraft 2 came into mind and I installed the game and started playing it.

That was when all of the problems started to appear. The game was quite slow, at first I blamed it on my old PC specs and I haven't had the cash to upgrade it. Well, I just can't bring myself to spending so much cash on upgrading a perfectly working machine. Another problem I kept getting was that Vista kept crashing my Starcraft 2 and after trying to reinstall the game again, I just couldn't do it! I blamed it on the game at first, because in order to install the game, I had to be connected to the internet which somehow my Vista's protocol was preventing the game from detecting the internet.

Well after a long hard consideration, I went ahead and reformatted my PC, installed Windows 7 on it and am loving it. Starcraft 2 seems to be able to play much smoother now. To be honest, I actually installed XP on it first but the copy of XP I had was a little too old which didn't have any of my hardware drivers which meant I couldn't connect to the internet to download them. After a painful weekend of installing it, I am quite pleased with Windows 7. Its a pity that I only have the 32-bit version with me, otherwise I would have installed the 64-bit version and fully utilize the 4Gb of RAM I have installed.

At the moment I am still keeping this machine clean, only installed Google Chrome, Open Office, Alvira AntiVirus and VLC player. I guess those are the softwares I pretty much need at the moment.

Can't wait to get a new replacement office laptop fitted out with Win 7. My current one is still running on XP.



Not too bad for a 3 year old PC scoring a 5.4 on the Windows Experience Index.

Update:
Check out this commercial for the new Windows 7 phone.