Ooh, it was so easy, Honey
Ooh, it was so fine
Ooh, it was so easy, Honey
Ooh, it was so fine
It Was So Easy -- Michael Chausse circa 1978
Well let's see now, by my reckoning I've been upgrading PC OSs since, oh, 1992.
I bought my first one with Doss installed...
Really dictating software? What the fuck is Doss? I mean you are computer software so I would think you would at least know your ancestors and know how to spell dos. No, not in small case, in uppercase. Oh mercy me, let me go ahead and just type it DOS. There.
Anyway, as I was saying, not quite sure which version DOS, but it wasn't even before the end of that year that I upgraded it to a new version of DOS and then eventually, early into 1993, of course I had to get Windows. I believe 3.0 was the version then. That didn't last long since 3.1 was hailed as the much preferred and, of course then within a couple years came the much trumpeted and heralded as if it were the new king of the realm, Windows 95.
I believe I have a post somewhere on this blog detailing the Midnight Madness that I attended at a CompUSA store with my friend John C. in Cranston, Rhode Island on the night of its debut with us geeks all fanboying watching on the many CRT monitors positioned around the store to be able to see Bill Gates usher in a "new age of computing." Ah the memories!
We didn't buy a copy though. It wasn't too difficult to pirate shit back then. In fact all the versions that I pretty much had on all my PCs have all been pirated up until I left my fellow pirates in Rhode Island and moved to Florida where I had to actually buy software retail, gasp! And what did I buy first at full price? Windows Millennial Edition. I talked about that in another post just a month shy of Windows XP debut only because my hard drive had died and I just had to get a new hard drive and with it a new operating system.
So it's been many years illicit copy or not that I've been playing the nerve-wracking game of having to upgrade to new versions with all the hair pulling and nail biting that comes with it. And I've had my doozies. I've had more than my share of total crashes, ultra fails, and multiple days of troubleshooting to be able to correct errors in just a simple upgrade from one version to the next. And yes I'm talking just one version of Windows to the next version of Windows. Microsoft isn't always very kind to its users. Oh I've upgraded a few Macs in my day too and of course, as Steve Jobs had always promised, those are absolutely effortless. You blink and they're done.
Well tonight I upgraded to Windows 11. I figured it was due time. Support for Windows 10 is going to be ending before the end of this year and it's better to get things done before you have to get them done just in case there are wrinkles that have to be ironed out.
I'm not a total newbie to Windows 11. I used it when I was doing that little 3-month job that I did last year, it was installed on that laptop they let me use so I got to try it out risk free really and I kind of liked it but I hesitated upgrading my computers since mainly Mildred 18 was deemed not worthy by the system analyzer and frankly I barely use my laptop so it didn't matter there so much.
But on a whim I had the time so I figured I'd give it a go tonight and in less than an hour including download and install I'm up and running. It kept everything intact, all my settings look very much the same as they did in Windows 10. All the software is there. Everything seems to work. It was a little bit of a panic mode when for some reason I clicked the wrong click somewhere along the line when I was taking a look at my dual monitor setup and I think I accidentally reversed the monitor alignment so that when I tried to slide a window over it wouldn't and then I discovered it was trying to orient my monitors in a funky way. I reclicked whatever I clicked before correctly and voila, all is good.
So good job Microsoft you finally achieved what you wanted to do way back in 1984; you imitated a Macintosh. The taskbar even has the icons displayed in the center at the bottom of the monitor just like an iMac.
It really does feel like 1984 all over again. But the players are different now...