Windows 7: No Party Here

Those (four) people that read my blog religiously will know that about a month or so ago I registered to have a Windows 7 Launch Party. I was pretty darn excited about doing this too. I have been a fan of Windows since it was just a tiny bit of tossed aside stained glass (lame attempt at humour). Seriously but, I think I was probably one of the first ten people in Perth (Australia) to load up Windows when it was Windows 286 (for installation on PCs with an 80286 intel CPU). I loaded it onto an NEC PowerMate II 286/10. Yep—that slash 10 (/10) means it was a 10 megahertz CPU. Those babies fairly zoomed along.

I can remember it clearly as if it were yesterday. I was on the third floor of the Western Mining Corporation Ltd (WMC) building in Belmont. As I recall, I had even managed to acquire a 17” monitor from somewhere.

In those days Windows came with an actual User Guide. From memory it was about A5 size and 1.5 cm thick. It told you how to use a mouse, and one of the things it suggested was that if you were normally right handed then you should set the mouse up for use with your left hand, and vice-versa. To this day, although I am right handed, I use the mouse with my left hand. This was excellent advice. This leaves your right hand free to make notes, turn pages, use the numeric keypad, insert disks or USB drives, or whatever, while you can still move around with the mouse.

But somewhere along the line the dudes at Microsoft lost track of this nifty line of thought because all installs of Windows now come with a right-handed mouse set-up by default, and it really should be the other way around—based on the assumption most people are right-handed and should therefore be using the mouse with their left hand.

Anyway, I digress. What I started out  to let you know was that my application to host a Windows 7 Launch party did not succeed. They passed me by.

This really put a puncture in my enthusiasm for the whole thing. I had got a price to have four Windows 7 banners printed on A1 sheets (594 x 841 cm, or 23.4” x 33.1” for our US friends). I was going to have four PCs set up and demonstrate the virtual seamless Windows XP machine within Windows 7, media streaming using two Windows 7 computers, the higher input/output performance, show how well Windows 7 works on an ‘older’ 1GB single CPU Pentium 4 2.4Ghz PC, cover the issues of ‘upgrading’ from Windows XP to Windows 7 (being that you can’t really ‘upgrade’ at all), and all sorts of other interesting stuff.

Anyway, it’s not going to happen.

So those girls that were using this event as an excuse to go out and buy new bikinis because of the dress code requirements (bikini top with jeans, skirt, or shorts—as demonstrated be Jennifer Hawkins) for the party have wasted their money—unless they actually want to wear their new bikinis at the beach (does anyone actually do that?). However I will still pay out on the $80 “blue bikini bonus” for those that bought blue bikinis. A receipt will be required.

Flip. I so wanted to do a Windows 7 Launch party.

Oh well. Such is life.

Barry.