12 August 2010

My Office PC Gets the Windows 7 Treatment

This morning a guy kept the elevator door open for me as I got off at the 10th. It was nice of him and I thought I'd seen him somewhere before but it was useless putting effort to figure out because I'm just like that in real life; unable to relate to people around me - the classic, true-blue anti-social.

I reached my cube and as I waited for my old PC to boot up, I noticed that my IP phone had one of those buttons arranged neatly in column lit up red. A missed call. When I checked the list, I saw a L** B**** register. He was the guy at the elevator - the IT dep't guy. No wonder he was familiar! He's one of them guys who take care of our PC quagmires here at work, coming up to the 10th occasionally.

And I needed him this morning, I finally remembered. He was supposed to upgrade my PC to Windows 7. There's this Windows 7 "campaign" at the office and I volunteered to be one of the first ones to upgrade because I was model employee.

That's a lie. I had actually thought I was gonna be given a shiny new CPU unit but to my utter disappointment, he just told me to back-up my stuff (they weren't much, just a bunch of Word files) in the USB flashdrive he lent me and then asked me, quite threateningly so at that, for the last time if I really was sure I got everything I needed because there was no turning back. I said yes. Well, condescendingly. Were we upgrading my OS or jumping off a cliff?

Anyhow, the next thing he did got me really frustrated. He just restarted my PC and booted off from the same USB flashdrive where I backed up my files in. 

He's simply restoring an image of a standard Windows 7 Enterprise installation on my PC. Yes, that same, old, bloody PC who BSOD'd on me some time ago.
No new PC.

I had to grab a cup of paltry unsweetened cafĂ© latte from the pantry's NescafĂ© dispenser to help me accept the fact. After about 40 minutes plus the time I spent pigging out for lunch with officemates, I came back to Windows 7 login screen.

Nothing new. At home we've been using Windows 7 since it came it out in Beta. But and idea struck me:
Why not check the Windows Experience Index?

My PC (which I'm gonna live with as long as I continue working where I work now) specs:
Intel Core 2
2 GB RAM (not sure but it's most probably DDR2)
80 GB HDD
Intel Q965/Q963 graphics chip

Here's its score:
Ok, it's unfair to say this, given that my HP Mini 311 runs Ion (which is same old Romeo that is NVidia 9400M, just by "any another name") and my office PC runs an Intel Q965 chip. But my HP Mini 311 is able to hold up its own with 2.3.

Not too shabby, I dare say.

No comments: