Lucky number 7?

So, while I'm at work today, my husband is installing Windows 7 on my computer at home. We had a Windows 7 launch party back in October, but we hadn't had the time to do the data backups and all the other stuff that one does before wiping a hard drive and installing a new OS.

World of Warcraft's patch 3.3 dropped last week, and an interface addon that I use to track crafting professions and inventory across my characters stopped working. Or rather, it started crashing WoW. It did not, however, crash WoW on my husband's computer. So at some point amidst all the WoW crashing, my husband thought it would be a good time to upgrade my Windows.

I'm apprehensive about it. I'm using an Intellimouse Explorer 3.0 driver that allows me to, within the preset button mapping options, have Escape mapped to the large thumb button. I use it for everything. The newer drivers do not include Escape in the options and, ahem, try mapping Escape to anything and see what the software does for you. (Oh, you want out of this window! Erg.) There's supposedly some third-party driver that will let me do it, but I will be twitchy if I can't make it work.

Additionally, I've been using Windows XP for what - eight years now? I managed to dodge Vista, but I'm used to XP. Yeah, the jump from 3.1 to Windows 95 was pretty big, but since then, it's not been a huge difference for me from a user standpoint. So Windows 7, especially with its file storage changes, is probably going to be different for me.

I'm a heavy user of the quick launch bar. I don't really do desktop icons. I drop all the shortcuts on the desktop into a folder called "Shortcuts," and then I add the Desktop as a menu on the taskbar. Just on the computer I'm on right now, my quick launch bar has IE, Show Desktop, Outlook, my feedreader, ILLiad, Aleph, Notepad, Word, Excel, Publisher, Calculator, MS Paint, and Firefox. I don't know exactly how that's going to change, but I remember Mom's system at Thanksgiving being... different.

I don't use the Windows XP icky blue and green - I have my theme set to something like "Windows Classic." I've had the same desktop image for close to ten years. (Can you really go wrong with the cover for Dark Side of the Moon?) I set my MS Office 2007 to "Silver." I turned the Quick Access Toolbar in Word into an old-style toolbar by putting all the buttons I normally use on it, displaying it below the Ribbon, and hiding the Ribbon. I still call the Office button the "File menu" in my head.

I'm starting to sound grumpy and against change to me. :P It's more the "don't fix it if it's not broken" mindset for me. I don't like being forced to drop a program or operating system that's working fine for me because the company that makes it stops supporting it. It's rather irritating. Like when FixedSys became not the default font for Notepad - I've been copying that over from system to system for years now.

It's like when the grocery stops carrying something you've been buying for 10 years. I really was okay with Windows 98. I could have stopped there. (You know, other than that memory leak. Besides that.)

I really wish Windows developed changes to work like UI Addons for WoW work - the basic WoW is still underneath, tweaked over time for stability, etc. But then you can get interface addons to, for example, change your private messages to their own windows, or to track data across multiple characters and make it searchable, or to let you move around where you have your buttons. Things like mouse gestures that are in Windows 7, or the changed appearance and function of the taskbar. I wish I could keep my XP framework, and pick and choose stuff to add on top of it, instead of scrapping what I've got and having to rebuild how I do things.

Blizzard's model for WoW - an original game, and now two expansions, with a third on the way - has left the original interface by and large intact; there have been additional options added, but the game is still there; characters have been greatly modified over time, but there won't be any really major functionality changes until Cataclysm. Between expansions, there are 3-4 major content patches, all of which bring tweaks. I guess the third expansion is going to be, functionally, like the Vista of WoW. (There are at least two big mechanics changes and the original map is being redone.) Hopefully we won't have to wait for the Windows 7 of WoW for things to be sane again. :P