We finally replaced my old computer yesterday. I’d had it for about six years and I really wasn’t ready to give it up. But, I’d been using hubby’s all the while we’d been in Ohio and had gotten quite accustomed to having things work correctly—without double screen images that jiggled as I tried to read them, with images that loaded in less than 3 minutes, and to not being told I was out of memory.
The only reason we hooked mine up is that Michael will be working vacation relief for the next two weeks. He’s doing the superintendent’s graveyard shift at a large Kroger grocery store remodel. This meant I couldn’t pound away at the keys in my make-shift office in the bedroom of our small apartment during the day, because he’ll be sleeping. (I REALLY miss my office back at the farm!) And I couldn’t get my trusty drill and poke holes wherever necessary to run new cables. I had to work with what had already been installed. That’s tough for a woman who believes every woman should own a reciprocating saw, a six foot level, and a worm drive circular saw—and know how to use them.
Since we had brought my office furniture from the farm over the Memorial Day weekend, we hooked my old HP up in the living room. It felt comfortable to have my desk and chair and bookcase. I’d already removed a couple of dead moths from the Brother printer/scanner/fax/copier, but it still wasn’t working. That was sort of depressing, but my computer was still—I won’t say “humming” because that would be an outright lie—but it was ker-chinging and ker-chunking along.
It was the software that was the primary issue. I couldn’t load FrontPage 2003 because my MS Office was too old. And I couldn’t load it up with new software because there wasn’t enough memory. Like a favorite blanket, the time had come to give it up.
Off we went to BestBuy on the Fourth of July. Sad, isn’t it, that we had nothing better to do on a three day weekend? Anyway it all boiled down to whether I wanted a Celeron or AMD processor. My geeky kid hates Celeron and loves AMD, and since I have to call him on a semi-regular basis with computer issues, thought it best to go with the AMD. Because we’re saving up for retirement, rather than slapping the purchase onto a credit card, we waited until the bank opened on Tuesday so we could pay cash.
For a price less than what it would have cost to purchase more RAM, a new monitor, new MS Office, and new QuickBooks to load into the old PC, I now had a whole new system sitting on my Mission style desk. It looked good.
My old computer had been easy to network to Michael’s computer. I loaded the router software into it and it accepted it and did exactly what it was supposed to do. Hmmm.
After about five hours of total frustration, and I mean the near-tears kind of frustration, I was finally able to get all the network IDs and various settings to match up. The router software finally loaded onto the new computer and at 9:00 last night, I was fully hubbed to the network. It took much digging through the archives of my mind to find just the right files and pieces of information to make it all work, but finally it did, and I was up and running on my new computer.
My printer still doesn’t work—I’ll be taking it apart next to see what else may have nested in there while it sat unused at the farm.
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