So my Windows 7 copy came in the mail last week, actually last Thursday to my surprise. They really wasted no time in sending it which made it all the sweeter deal.

Anyways, so far I'm fairly satisfied with it. I don't really have any complaints on it, as most of the new UI changes have been for the better, and the hype surrounding it's better performance is warranted, in some respect though. I probably won't change any minds, but honestly it's a mostly painless transition from Vista to 7.

The whole Aero Snap feature is alright, it does make it slightly easier and little more intuitive to maximize windows and such and change their size, but it's really comes in as a "Oh okay, that's kinda cool" feature. Besides that, the biggest change I noticed at first was the task bar at the bottom, which gets rid of the all the text and the long rows and rows of open programs. They're all now integrated into what used to be the quick launch area.

Most of the changes in 7 seem to be related to window management, and tweaking it to be a little different and perhaps more "advanced." It's alright and all, but it's definitely a step in the right direction. Besides that, my favorite new feature is the fact that you can set your desktop background to switch every so often. I love it, because it freshens up my desktop every so often, so that it's not so stagnant because of how lazy I am.

About performance, I've noticed maybe a 8% difference in memory usage, and I have 2 GB of RAM. 7 seems to run constantly at about 32% memory, while Vista stayed at around 40%. So it's not a HUGE difference, but it's something nonetheless. Even now with Firefox open, I'm at 38% so it seems it does run lighter, but I do say that overall I don't really notice a difference. I'm just going off what my memory/CPU monitor says.

Overall, I say I'm happy with Windows 7. I would honestly say, if you can get a good discount on it, get it. It'll be well worth it, I'm just not too sure I can justify paying the full 200+ dollar upgrade on it now. In that case, if I were you I'd just get a new computer with it pre-installed.

I just freaking LOVE college discounts.

I quite literally just got a Windows 7 Ultimate upgrade for...

Guess how much?

Not $219.99. Not even $30.00.

I just ordered it for 15 dollars through my university. Now that is a ****ing awesome deal!!

You can imagine how excited I am considering that the nationwide student discount left me out in the cold because I have Vista Ultimate, and the only options left for me included a dual boot or a clean install using 7 Home Premium. Now not only do I get Windows 7 Ultimate, but I also got it at a literal steal of a price.

So, whoever is reading this and goes to college, I order you to check if you can get it anywhere near this cheap. Even 30 dollars is not a bad deal. Check both on the nationwide Windows 7 student discount and through your university itself. I honestly can't believe I almost passed this up.

Now to wait for the disc to come in the mail. Yay!!

(Isn't it sad that I'm this happy over an OS upgrade? lol )

Yeah the title is right, years and years after the fact I've finally decided to join online gaming.

I kind of hesitated for the last couple of months getting Xbox live, but since my younger brother got an 360 Arcade for his birthday last month, I decided "What the hell" and winged it. I will have to recover my gamertag on my brother's 360 now once I don't have access to my roommate's 360 (which has been a godsend lol).

Anyways, here's my gamertag for those interested:

MTheEnd88

I realize now that I'm utterly cursed in the creative name department. But it works, at least it's not some l33t name or some god-awful, mispelled corruption of regular words. I've see way too many of those on Xbox live, and I just joined last night. >_>

But yeah, there we go. Time to make those 50 bucks count.

So yesterday I finally discovered that my roommate has had Gears of War 2 this entire time I've lived with him (which is now getting close to 2 months). Yeah I felt pretty sheepish knowing that there have been countless hours where I've been bored and without anything to do, and I could've been playing GoW2. Definitely is half my fault though for not scanning the games he had though.

So I started playing that yesterday, and today I decided to pick up Dead Space. Apparantly this game is ridiculously elusive right now because it just got a price drop to 20 dollars. However, 2 of my local GameStops were sold out, Best Buy was sold out, and the local Walmart was trying to sell it to me at 30 bucks. Aww hell no. So I went a little farther to another GameStop and they had no new copies. >_>

I asked the guy at the desk if they had any new copies, only to be told "They stopped making this game." O_o I probably gave him a weird look without meaning to (I mean what he said made no sense), but either way I just decided to get the used copy they had. So I've been playing it ever since... and it's awesome.

Definitely a good reward because I've been really busy lately with my midterm exams. I had 4 in the last 6 school days, which is no fun. Now I've got some extra time, time that I'm going to spend wisely. *jumps back to roommate's 360 for some more Dead Space and eventually some GoW2*

Aggravation is me. So for the past few days I've had no internet at my apartment for no explainable reason. So of course, the first thing I do is march down to my apartment office and figure out why. They simply say "call the internet company, we can't really do anything about it, sorry." So that's what I do.

1 hour later I'm still on the phone with some pseudo-machine customer service representative (I say pseudo machine because they talk like an answering machine yet have a thick undertone accent...) that cannot seem to comprehend that the problem is NOT with my computer. Good lord, I mean it's out in my entire apartment, hell my apartment office even alluded to the fact that many apartment buildings were having problems.

But no... customer service refused to send someone to my apartment to do something until I switched out my ethernet cable. Anyone with half a brain would realize that it's a problem either on the internet company's end or a hardware problem outside of the apartment. Problem is, I don't have another cable, so I lied. Yes I lied so they would get off their butts and do something.

That was 2 days ago. I'm still without internet.

It's the weekend. The cover-all excuse for not fixing ****.

So I'm currently hopping between Wi-Fi hotspots around my town so I'm not "that guy who sits there all day." Oh well. Needless to say I probably won't be around much until they fix it - should hopefully only be a few days. I'm already getting tired of driving places just to check on the bare essentials (school email and such).

But yeah, if I didn't say it enough, my internet provider sucks. It shall remain unnamed for the time being (because as soon as it's fixed I won't care how bad they were in fixing it, just as long as its finally fixed )