Holy Cow, We May be Done...

I think nearly all the bugs are worked out of my upgrade to Windows 7. Sadly, there's some wishblade files that did not make it, and I'm pretty bummed about that, but there's not much I can do about it, fretting, fitting, crying, or raging won't change anything so I guess I just need to move on. Sadly, I lost a quaterly club worth of downloads for vacation and summer type files. I also had this great Tiffany style lamp file that I won and it's gone too. I also had some original designs that I lost. Luckily, I had a back up from some point so I'm not starting completely from scratch, but I'm not close to having my complete library either, I guess I'm somewhere in the middle. As far as Windows 7 itself, I have to say, I HATE, with a passion, the change they made to the side bar. Vista had space set aside for the side bar, more than three gadgets on it and it gave you another page, you just flipped to them. You could even choose to leave them on top, and the other screen sizes would adjust so that gadgets like twitter, blogger, and pandora were always in view, always easy to monitor and respond to. The screen didn't cover the gadgets and the gadgets didn't block your screen. That's gone. Windows 7 has DESKTOP gadgets, they're not kept in a neat tidy pile in the side bar, you can scatter them all over your desk top if that floats your boat - but it covers those gorgeous desktop photos they give you and just drives me crazy. I like seeing nice neat columns. The other draw back? Your screen will cover them. You can choose to keep them on top, but then they block portions of your screen. I will have to adjust my screen sizes manually each time if I want to be able to see updates that roll across, or tell Pandora never to play a song again. Right now I have my gadgets layered under other gadgets trying to keep them all contained in one column. I have enough of the bottom ones peeking out that I can still click on them when I need them, but until I do, they're hidden away. On the plus side, I think W7 is faster. I've noticed a significant difference in start up time as well as logging onto the internet, and that makes me happy. I finally have full control of my touch pad, but drivers had to be downloaded for this to happen. My wishblade finally works right, and my outlook account may or may not alert me consistently when I receive a message. It's set to, but hasn't yet. We made one change that I hope will help. Through this all, my brother-in-law, Lonnie at Computer Techs ( http://www.ctkcmo.com ) has been there to help me. Thank you brother! I would probably throw the computer across the room, and never have any fun using it ever again if it wasn't for you! I also had some of the ladies at paperthreads.com helping me out with suggestions when my wishblade wasn't working right, so a great big thank you to them too! You helped keep me from going completely crazy, now I'm just somewhat crazy, but that may not have had anything to do with this update ;) So, now, I'm going to step away from the computer and relax, get over the stupid gadget change and mourn my lost wishblade files and move on.