My old computer was finally giving way, starting to have blue screens at least once a week and some other erratic issues. That’s never a good sign. And when you’re talking about a 5 year old laptop that’s already had the motherboard replaced once…well, it was just time to replace, before it dies a catastrophic death.
At first I was thinking I’d just get another laptop, but when I started looking at computers, a relatively new form-factor caught my eye–the all in one flat-panel touch-screen computers. Just think of how much desk space this would free up! And a full HD screen? That doesn’t require an external monitor sitting next to it? And it’s not like I ever take that computer with me when I travel, since the netbook is a lot more portable.
I was kind of procrastinating at making a decision about the new computer, until I got a look at the new Windows 8, and decided I really just wasn’t ready to make the leap toward the experiment of their new UI, which by all accounts is great for touch-screen tablets but “may be” a step backward for desktop users, accustomed to having a start button and doing heavy multi-tasking. Two days later, I’d ordered a clearance windows-7 machine online. I would have bought in person, but I really wanted an I5 processor (that seems to be the sweet spot of performance vs price at the moment) and not an AMD processor, and definitely not an intel pentium (they still make those?!?!), and that pretty much eliminated everything I could get locally.
A week later it arrived, and luckily turned out to be as fantastic as I expected, and fit on my desk with less than an inch to spare between the monitor and the hutch on my desk. Not that there aren’t a few things I would have done differently if I were designing the computer, but nothing I can’t live with.
Around the same time as I was trying to get everything installed on the new computer, I discovered a nasty click-fraud rootkit virus on the netbook that I primarily use for web-surfing. Long story short, even after running bunch of different virus scanners and malware removers and “fixing” multiple viruses, I couldn’t get the suspicious network activity to cease, so I had to order restore disks from Toshiba and reformat. Too bad I never got around to making the restore disks *before* it was infected. I suppose I’ll have to start doing a better job of actually installing all the windows security updates and browser updates, even if the lastest firefox is giving me nothing but trouble and crashes a lot ;-).
So, between all that and the holidays, and working on the annual photo calendars, I haven’t had as much time to work on my usual “geek projects” as I’d like. That and every time I go to work on a particular project I find another program or two I still need to install for that task, or some important registry key or password or file that got missed when I was migrating files to the new computer that I have to track down, which can just be time consuming. But things are coming together and I’m putting the computer to good use.
Oh, and there’s a hope I might actually be able to install the free version of Visual Studio on the new machine, since the issues I was having on the old computer with it being unable to install a certain service pack required for Visual Studio is now moot.