Friday, January 6, 2012

New Year, New Computer, New Laments


Now that the holidays are over, and I'm back to work (sort of), the biggest thing to work on learning is the new laptop my husband bought for me. Of course, that's probably just so that I don't continue to call him saying "my laptop's frozen up, and I can't this thing opened to do your bookkeeping right now!" And "Can you get this thing to run faster?" Or "Why is this thing running so slowly?" Notice how I generally refer to it as "this thing?" As much as I've been thrilled to have a "new" laptop, apparently they don't make things like they used to, and a 3 year old refurbished computer that you've had for 2 years really doesn't get it done.

So, I got a new one. The first one that he brought home had a fabulous 17" screen that he thought I would love, since I don't use a separate monitor. Pretty much everything I do is on the laptop, including the keyboard, and the mouse. I had a separate webcam that I plug in when I need it, and the printer of course. But, he figured he was doing my eyes a favor. And he was! Except that he wasn't going to be doing my back any favors. The thing weighed a ton! And since I'm generally cruising around the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations with my laptop, I did NOT want to be lugging that 10 pound weight across my back.

So we settled on a smallesr one, which I like very much. It has a built in webcam, a keypad for numbers (I didn't have that before, and with the accounting, it's nice to just turn on the number lock and go). Since I had been at about capacity with my old 55GB hard drive (why does this stuff take up so much room?) It's nice to have a nice big partitioned hard drive and a whole mess of RAM. I remember the days when it was an upgrade to get 256MB of memory. This one has 8 GB! Not that I would presume to know what that means, I just know that the thing is blazing fast, and though I'm still getting used to the keyboard, I really like it.

The biggest issue is transferring all the old stuff to the new computer. An external hard drive and a girlfriend with way saavy computer skills is a must for this project. Then there's all the new software you have to deal with, and finding where everything is!

The first day I started working on reloading the software, I dropped the whole thing, and bent the door on the DVD tray. I just about cried, but nothing like a couple of screwdrivers and a set of needlenose pliers (and above mentioned computer saavy girlfriend with mad skills!) to set everything back where it belongs. Probably the biggest new thing I've learned is that these new laptops are slippery little suckers. After the DVD door incident, it slid off my laptop desk and luckily I caught the thing with my foot!

  The new OS is OK, somewhat hard to find stuff. I've always used microsoft XP, but now have MS 7, and everything looks weird. I'm sure after a while, it'll be second nature, and I'll have definitely learned at least one new thing today.