New toy

I haven't been posting much lately. But for the last several days, I have an excuse. On Tuesday, I my laptop arrived! No, I didn't really NEED a laptop. But my Dell desktop was pretty old (I checked - we got it in 2001). It was making funny noises, especially at startup, that made me worry about the hard drive. And it was slow! The last straw was when Jason checked it out and found out the memory was at 512MB, and it was MAXED OUT, and the processor was running at under 1 GHz. Of course, I do have a Mac desktop as well, that I was actually using for most things. But I liked my Windows version of Quicken, and I had one or two other programs that had no Mac equivalent. Yes, I could put Windows on the Mac. But frankly, I just wanted a laptop. My excuse is, now I can do the bills while watching television, so it won't be such a horrible chore.

Anyway, it's a shiny new Dell with 3 MB RAM, 2 GHz processor speed, and a 250 GB hard drive. (Well, not actually shiny on the outside; shiny in the Firefly sense. I got the blue color. Which is a little dark, but it's cool that it looks different when it's in the light.)

And I've spent tons of time this last week getting it set up. Loading the programs I want or need (which does not include most of the programs that were on the desktop, actually!) Transferring data from the old Dell and the Mac. Which was easy from the Dell (I had an external hard drive to use), but much more difficult from the Mac (couldn't connect the external drive too it, and for a long time, couldn't find it on the network). I'm proud that I was able to do all of that on my own. Of course, my tech support person was (IS) in Nicaragua, so I had to either do it myself or wait. And I don't do waiting well.

Now all my photos and music are nicely organized on the new computer. I have all the programs I need, and most of the ones I want, set up and ready to go. And have tried out all the important ones. I'm still using the Mac, but it is fun to play on the computer during commercial breaks, or like now, just sitting on the couch with the computer on my lap.

Yes, it was self-indulgent and unnecessary. I don't care. Another instance when I am not acting like an adult. (Oh yeah, I haven't actually posted the entry about being an adult yet. Maybe soon. Not sure it's ready for publication.)

I'm having fun with it. It's a new toy!