Windows 7 – Took the plunge

I have been resisting for a long time, but my work gave me a brand new laptop with Windows 7 Professional preloaded on it.

So…rather than downgrade I thought I would finally get used to it and really take the time to give it a fair shake.

Yes…they moved things and getting to some items is not as easy as it used to be, but they improved some things too.

Like this Windows Live Writer – maybe this was around and available for XP too, but I didn’t know about it. I actually only found it by accident:

I am away from home on work and my wife runs a little book publishing business (shameless plug – www.yournickelsworth.com). Anyway…she wanted me to update our website with a review of a book that she recently finished. She sent me a .DOC file and a massive 2MB .jpg file.

I just got this new laptop (as I said) and I don’t have Word nor Photoshop – which I would normally use to massage into .HTML and then post onto the website. But, didn’t have any of those tools. So…..

I knew that if I emailed the .DOC file to myself at my gmail account, I could view it as HTML, so I thought that that would be a good start. But it turned out to be easier than that. After receiving the email at gmail, I was able to edit online! Cool stuff. Then there is an option to “Share” with everyone…so I did that.

Next, ...I figured out a way to resize the 2MB jpg even without Photoshop....I started editing it with the builtin Windows 7 tools, and I noticed an option to make it into a Blog post (this is where I found the Windows Live Writer thing). So, I posted it to my blog which automatically resized it and then I download that image and then added it to the Google Document I had been editing.

And Voila…I now had a page that I could link to and share with everyone on the web. I added the link to my wife’s website and I was done.

Now that I know how to post to my blog using the Windows Live Writer and how much easier it makes it, I will probably blog more often.

Jim