Digital Life

You know what boggles my mind? In this era of digital technology, we still have to do a lot of stuff manually. Take Windows, for example. My current system came equipped with Windows Vista. It was the only system that supported the hardware at the time so I was stuck with it. Honestly over the years I haven't really had any problems using it, unlike apparently the rest of the world.

So as you can imagine, my computer's getting a bit long in the tooth. It's 4 years old now, but I chose a system that is very upgrade friendly on the hardware front. And really, it's hardly slow, given that I'm running on a tri-core processor with 4 gigs of RAM. So given all of this information, I have decided to do some upgrades.

First on my list was the most obvious and logical choice: upgrade to Windows 7. I'm sorry, but that Windows 8 Metro thing is bullshit. Touch screens are a long way from standard, so why are they installing a touchscreen interface as a desktop standard? That's stupid. And Windows 7 runs better on the same hardware than Vista...not exactly a difficult thing, I suppose.

Given the digital era we live in, I opted to upgrade from the comfort of my office chair. A quick pop over to the Microsoft website and I purchased the online upgrade that you get at a discount solely for upgrading. Pretty sweet, right? So I download it and upgrade. Side note: anything that runs on a driver, such as a printer, a firewall and certain types of AV software should be uninstalled first. Good to know for next time!

A few hiccups and a minor hardware issue (the battery that runs the internal clock died) later, I'm all shiny and new on Windows 7. While I was at it, I upgraded my monitor, keyboard and mouse. Cause I'm cool like that. Went from a generic no-name 17" to 24" ASUS LED. Keyboard and mouse are now wireless--the keyboard is even rechargeable. Good deal and excellent cable management, if I do say so myself.

So everything is hunky dory for awhile, I'm happily computing away, as always. Then I start getting these strange messages about Windows activation. Wait, I say to myself, but I downloaded the upgrade. Wouldn't it automatically activate, given that I purchased the software directly from Microsoft? You know, that common sense thing. It's a myth. Despite the fact that I downloaded directly from Microsoft, I still have to activate my new OS manually. Call me crazy, but I think that's kind of stupid. Especially since they sent my new product key via the confirmation email when I purchased the software. Why can't it just license itself automatically when it upgrades? I mean seriously.

And now you understand the title of my blog. First world problem, indeed.