I’ll admit it: I really don’t mind Win­dows. In fact, I quite like it. I could hap­pily use Linux if it could run Pho­toshop with any pro­fi­ciency, and I’m sure I’d love a Mac if I could just find a rel­at­ive I could sell in order to buy one, but des­pite all of the hoo-hah, and once all user account warn­ings have been dis­abled within an inch of their lives, the Win­dows of 2009 is really not that bad. This is quite a use­ful thing, given that for the second time in two weeks I’m watch­ing Win­dows 7 install onto a machine at a speed that would make a snail quake in its boots. You know, if a snail could wear boots. Or install Win­dows 7.

The first install was planned, a full install on a brand new Vista laptop, and went smoothly apart from that small issue with the graph­ics driver and the web­cam only show­ing upside down images. You want to chat with someone who appears to be hanging from the ceil­ing? I’m your girl. The second install was not so planned, but ended up being an upgrade-ish from Vista to Win­dows 7 on my desktop’s shiny new hard drive, a hard drive that talks to my com­puter and works and everything. I say upgrade-ish, because you can’t upgrade from Vista Home We’re Awe­some Edi­tion to Win­dows 7 We’re Suit-wearing Pro­fes­sion­als Edi­tion, and so it makes up a story about how it’s doing a clean install. This is a blatant lie, incid­ent­ally, but a happy lie from Microsoft for once.

All of this is a long-winded way of say­ing, I love Nin­ite. The first thing I nor­mally do after a rein­stall is open Inter­net Explorer and use that to down­load Fire­fox. Once Fire­fox is sor­ted, I then start the three-day-long pro­cess of work­ing out what it is I actu­ally use, remem­ber­ing only when I go to use a pro­gram that I still need to down­load and install it. Nin­ite takes out the guess­work. Open IE, head to IE, tick boxes for almost everything I use on a daily basis — includ­ing Fire­fox, Thun­der­bird, Note­pad++, Spo­tify, Adobe Reader, AVG, VLC and Win­SCP — and I can down­load a cus­tom installer that gets it all done at once. This means that the only soft­ware I need to manu­ally install are the big­gies — Pho­toshop, Illus­trator, Light­room, and any drivers that need to be argued with (assum­ing that those drivers are avail­able before mid-November, that is. Just sayin’, Hewlett-Packard.) So kudos, Nin­ite — you have made the past two weeks infin­itely easier.

(Note: all credit for the pump­kin above must go to our next door neigh­bours. Sadly, I can­not take any credit for those artist­ic­ally swirly eyes or the way our stair­well sud­denly smells a lot like rot­ting veg. You don’t know how temp­ted I am to take the lid off and put the ham­ster inside, just hav­ing him knock on our door to get in again once he’s had his fill.)