Where's Agi been? Well, I spent the better part of the weekend getting my kids PC up and running. I had been using the Release Candidate version of Windows 7. However, MS (in their infinite wisdom) decided that even though it would expire in June, they would begin shutting the computer down every two hours starting in March until you replaced the RC. Unfortunately, you cannot upgrade the RC to a regular version so I had to start from scratch.

I purchased Win7 Home Premium. It installed quickly, with little problem. In fact, the only real problem I had was with formatting. I used a brand new, unformatted drive. During the install process, it gives you the ability to make your partitions and asks you where to put the OS. I made a 120GB partitiona and told Win7 to install there. Instead, it chose the remaining space and made the partition there and installed the OS there. After installing, I was able to shrink that partition...but only so far. The OS' unmovable system files that meant I could only shrink that partition to 280GB. Unfortunately, the space I got back could not be combined with the original 120GB so I ended up with three partitions. It's not a deal breaker, just a little frustrating. The rest of the weekend was install all the software and getting all the patches and updates.

The File and Settings Transfer utility is really nice. It lets you transfer seetings and stuff from the old PC to the new one. It worked well.

Man, I don't like doing that too often!