This morning when I turned on my monitor, I see that updates are pending from Microsoft. I click on the icon to see needs to be updated. I see that over 400MB will be downloaded, so I assume that it is not one of those Windows Definitions update. I look to see what needs to be installed and I see Office 2007 Service Pack One is recommended, as well as Internet Explorer 8.
I first did a complete back-up with Acronis. Then I take my chances first with the Service Pack. I close Outlook 2007 but continue with a couple of things in a browser. After the download and installation, my computer tells me it wants to reboot to complete the installation. This is always a tense moment - wandering if I choose reboot if my computer will actually reboot properly. After a couple of minutes, it actually rebooted with no problems. Outlook took a few minutes to start back up, it was telling me it was preparing to start for the first time.
After I cleared a few of the role playing games on Facebook, I decided that I would take a chance to install Internet Explorer 8. I did a another backup with Acronis. I figured that since the computer was working OK with the Service Pack, I would revert back to the previous version. I shut down Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox, and Outlook and then decided to click on the button to install Internet Explorer 8.
Now, I had been using Internet Explorer 8 for quite some time on my other computer system with no problems. I was hoping I would have the same experience. And that tense moment again - the computer needs to reboot to complete the installation.
I watched as the screen went black and then started back up. After about a minute, I was getting a little nervous. It was probably another minute before the Windows screen was seen. Of course, it felt much longer.
And I am happy to report that everything seems to be going well. I was able to bring up some of the websites that I frequent and I did not need to enter my username or password. There were some things that had changed since the beta install, but I did notice that Yahoo!® was listed in one of the features (sorry I did not notate where).
I will say the text on the Internet seems a bit crisper and clearer. A couple of the websites seem to be faster as well. One issue I did notice was when replying to a message on the HTML Code Tutorial was the textarea input box seemed to have problems scrolling when I was entering text that required the form field to scroll. Hopefully that will be fixed in the next update.