I thought at first that I’d imagined it, but now I’m positive: Windows 7 sometimes deletes some of my icons off of my desktop when it reboots. Today, there at at least 6 missing: One to my Computer icon, all of the ones to my external drives and my CD drive, and one of my folder shortcuts.

WTF Microsoft?

My first thought was some sort of “unused icons” cleanup, but most of these were ones I used yesterday, so that can’t be it. Instead, it’s most likely a bug in the desktop manager or something. So annoying.

I got my network printer, a Xerox Phaser 6250 DP, to work by taking it off the network, plugging in in via USB instead, and letting Windows 7 auto-find and install it when I turned it on. It now seems to work just dandy, although I haven’t been able to find that nifty status indicator thingy that I had briefly before, where it would tell me the toner levels and such. Oh, well, at least I can print to the faster, color laser printer now.

I’d tried hooking up the Phaser via the same USB-to-Parallel printer cable gizmo that I’ve been using for the HP LaserJet 4000 for years, but that didn’t work either. No idea why, but maybe that’s also why only the PCL5 driver worked for the HP? Dunno, but when it failed with the Phaser, the direct USB cable worked instead. I hadn’t even remembered that there was a USB option on there, so I’m glad I noticed it when moving things around so cables would reach.

Now I don’t have any way to reach the HP unless I put it directly on my desk, which I may still do (the text quality is better on the HP). However, as it no longer seems capable of printing clean pages, maybe I’ll just use the Phaser from now on. Will think on it some more.

I just wanted to pop in a little note to my previous post, talking about Internet Explorer 8 and Windows 7. My IE8 was working fine once I rebooted, so something was off, but not a normal kinda of thing, I guess. IE8 had no problems on MSN or other sites I tested after the reboot. I’ll still be using FireFox for most things, but I thought I ought to post the correction.

I now have Windows 7 installed on my workstation. I installed it yesterday because, yet again, my copy of Windows XP on this machine decided it wouldn’t boot any more once it finished integrating the latest updates from Microsoft. So, no more of that, and hopefully things will be better with the brand new OS. (For the record, it continued being able to boot into Safe Mode, but would hang during startup trying to get into regular Windows. I don’t know why.)

On the whole, I’m liking it okay. Some stuff I quite like, other stuff I just find irritating. And, of course, finding some things will take some getting used to. I decided to install the 64-bit version, too, so we’ll so how that works out, although I don’t really expect any major issues. I’m still in the process of re-installing things, though, so there’s still plenty of time for disasters.

One interesting factoid: I opened Internet Explorer 8, which automatically goes to MSN.com, whereupon it promptly gets stuck trying to load what looks like some ad-server stuff. It never succeeds in completely loading the page, so it just sits there loading forever, and not letting me close the tab or the browser. Nice of Microsoft to make MSN not even IE8 compatible, when it automatically directs all the browsers there on startup. Also nice how they allow the user to graceful abort out of these situations – NOT. Won’t be a huge issue over all, as I usually use FireFox, but I’ll definitely have to try avoiding MSN.com in the future, which I’m sure was Microsoft’s plan all along.

Added Note: It appears IE8 is either broken, or incredibly stupid. It’s not just MSN.com that it has problems with, and it will not let me Stop or Back Up out of pages that are having issues while loading. This is not good, as I don’t have any problems with FireFox on these pages.