Comments Off
So, my laptop had been limping along for about the past year. First of all, the battery died. In order to use my laptop, I had to have it plugged in to an outlet, which of course, made it nothing more than a desktop computer on a diet. In recent months, one of the drives (the DVD, I hoped) started making funny noises. Well, not so much funny as downright haunting. If you accidentally closed the lid to hard or bumped the table where it was resting, the drives would start screaming; sometimes for a few seconds, sometimes, it wouldn’t stop until you forced a shutdown of the system and reboot. It served me well for the better part of five years. However, toward the end of last week, it started acting…well…funny.
The worst part is that I am leaving tomorrow to head to Atlanta for the Southeastern Theatre Conference where I’m going to be leading several workshops for which I have spent the better part of 6 months prepping PowerPoint presentations. In order to present these, I must have a laptop!! I could tell it wasn’t going to make it through the weekend.
Those of you who know me as a gadget freak will laugh at this statement, but I was literally making myself sick with images of standing up in front of a group of workshops attendees with a dead laptop and no way to present.
So, I bit the bullet and got a new laptop. This is not something I was planning on doing, but I could not get to Atlanta and be left in the lurch. It didn’t occur to me that a new laptop would come with Windows Vista loaded on it. This became an adventure that would last the entire weekend. I have just now finished getting all of my software loaded on the new computer and transferring files. You’d think that Windows projects would network, easily together, wouldn’t you? Oh no. Getting my old XP machine to even recognize my shiny new Vista machine, involved nearly two solid hours of tracking down an obscure software patch that Microsoft is not advertising anywhere. You gotta love it…
Still, the search, daunting though it was, was okay. I like “tinkering under the hood” of my computers. I know just enough to make me dangerous, but I still enjoy it. That’s why I decided to opt for another Windows machine rather than taking the plunge into MacLand. I’ve played around on some friends’ Macs lately, and I’m just not impressed enough to make the switch. I know Windows (even with the curve of learning where everything is in Vista).
I’m not convinced that Windows Vista is a step in the right direction. Sure it’s pretty, but it’s just weird.
Comments Off