OHMAGURD!!!!! Early Christmas presents abound! So my wonderful boyfriend got me an amazing new laptop. It’s the HP Envy Laptop. There’s a few huge differences from what I’m used to: 1. Windows 8, 2. Windows 7 elements inside windows 8, 3. Touchpad gestures on a laptop’s mouse?, 4. 64 bit operating system.
So I’m gonna work backwards because I’m weird like that.
4. 64 bit OS: So I would like to consider myself pretty tech savvy. If I don’t know how it works, I have to fiddle until I understand the ins and outs. I enjoy fiddling!! I’ve known for a long time that there are 32 bit and 64 bit versions of operating systems. But I’ve never understood the difference. Well now I have a Windows 8 64 bit laptop and from my new understanding it just means that the computer can handle more memory. And this thing is zippy so I’m very happy.
3. Touchpad: It’s a laptop mouse, it’s a gesture enabled pad. Instead of scrolling along the sides like with a normal laptop mousepad, this bad boy works like touchscreen phone. It’s very different, and I keep accidentally doing gestures, like swiping in from the left & right side and top. But I like it!
2 & 1. Windows 8 and its Windows 7 bits & pieces.
Ok so my Dell Studio laptop was Windows Vista. I loved it. It was clean, graphic, and not too dissimilar from XP that it wasn’t hard to figure out. I never tried Windows 7 because it just looked like a graphical upgrade from Vista. Well I don’t know if 7 to 8 is a big change. But for sure, going from Vista to 8 is a HUGE CHANGE.
At first Windows 8’s new Start Menu and “Metro” apps can be very confusing. I even did some research before getting the laptop to hopefully know what I was going to be working with. But thankfully there was a preinstalled app that had manuals, tutorials, and videos to get me started. Picture 3 is the new start menu, noticeably anything Metro (the new stuff) runs fullscreen with minimal interfaces geared towards touchscreen devices and maximum viewing space with minimal to no clutter whatsoever. It’s really nice. Metro apps can be docked to the sides of the screen to run two at once. You can also have a metro app running docked while you use the desktop. It’s a big learning curve but I a loving this computer more and more!