Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Did I Say Boring?

SHIP'S LOG:

As my former laptop had survived the ICW journey and made it back home, it has become time to give it a rest. It is seven years(7) old now and beginning to show its age. There is more junk on it that I can seemingly remove, they don't make batteries for it anymore and so it must work plugged into the wall, the video and wifi cards are out of date, in short it is ancient in terms of our current computer/electronic world. It became necessary to send it onto the great cyber world of the beyond. So I purchased a new one and that's where the boredom ended.

It was not that I got enthralled with all the new features and dodads with which it was loaded, rather it was that getting what I needed and want from the old computer out and into the news was a time consuming process. Some of the programs on my Old PC simply wouldn't transfer to the New. Wihout QUICKEN for instance, withoput which my finances would be even more screwed up than they are with it, wouldn't make the transfer even though the two PCs wrere cable connected. So it was, I had to find the CD containing the version of Quicken that I was currently use and install the program on the new PC. Then I had to get all the back-upped records off the old PC and onto the new so that they would backup and restore the records on the new PC.

I also had to reinstall my Verizon Wireless Manager so that I can access the Internet when I can vampire off a free Wifi Hotspot. That CD is long gone and I had to do a tour of a whole host of Verizon websites to finally get the one that would allow me to download the software and have the system up and running on the new PC.

This Dell computer, as most PCs I don't doubt, comes with Microsoft Internet Explorer loaded and selected as the default Internet browser. But I don't use Internet Explorer as it has more bugs in it then they would like you believe. I use Mozilla Firefox. Of course, Microsoft doesn't like it and it wouldn't transfer anything between computers if it has the taint of Firefox. So it is that I had to transfer all of the Bookmarks on Firefox one at a time onto the new PC. Such fun!

And figuring out all the new widgets, thingamabobs and doohickeys, deciding which to keep active and which to shut down, well it was a full day. By the time my brain had turned to mush, I actually had not even finished half of what I wanted to do. So it will be another full day today. What slows the process is that the set up of the keyboard is slightly different arrangement that the old PC's setup. I have been hitting a lot of wrong keys which really can mess up and prolong the process.

Well off the cyber salt mines.