Yesterday I went through the hassle of reinstalling the OS on my desktop. I’d been torn between Windows 7 and Ubuntu, but in the end it was Windows 7.
Whenever I mention Windows 7, my friends’ first concern is always compatibility. The last stretch of time I used Windows 7, as I recall, was back at Qoolu, and every night WoW, CnC3 and RA3 all ran without a single compatibility issue. Older games are a different story, though (why do I always start with games…). EA games from before Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth, Warcraft, Diablo and the like are all unsupported. Oddly enough, it is compatible with StarCraft — the “garbled graphics” version, that is. Taobao and online banking, naturally, are not compatible.
This time I wasn’t installing it for gaming performance. What I mainly wanted was a machine for the occasional bit of entertainment, but above all to serve as a test server for my development environment.
My worry was whether it would hold up well as a server. Once it was installed, I found that as a dev test machine (setting aside the performance demands of high concurrency), it works pretty much ideally. I set up IIS7.5 + .net2.0 + php5.2.1 + mysql5 + phpmyadmin.
Unlike when I’m at the office, this time I installed the Chinese version, and I found plenty of details are more user-friendly. There are still a few harmless bugs, though, while I wait for MS to put out patches. My poor desktop has put in years of service, slaving away for me like an ox; now that it’s getting on in years, I’m giving it a new heart so it can spring back to life. Time flies — after all these years, the system rating comes out at just 4.4 now; the CPU and memory have both aged. Back in the day it scored 4.8 under Vista.
Norton on my laptop is about to expire. Once it does, I may reinstall Windows 7 there too.