PC Kvetching

I adore my laptop. I hate everything there is about moving to a new PC.

BUT—I’m sitting here in my recliner, all comfy, working away with a wireless connection to the network!

I’m having trouble adjusting to the keyboard—my typing definitely isn’t terribly accurate at the moment. I’ve thought about using another keyboard and mouse, but they’d use up a lot of real estate. I certainly wouldn’t tote them to school with me, so I’d best get used to using the built-in keyboard and touchpad.

I’m unimpressed with XP. Now, if I were setting up a PC for a non-technical person, and wanted to protect them from themselves, some of the features would be helpful. For me, though, I want an installation option that says, “I know this shit, don’t set it up that way.”

I need to find the Office installation CDs so that I can get moving on my homework and a bunch of other stuff. I need to reinstall QuickBooks and HomeSite and Acrobat and a godawful bunch of other software. While looking for them, I did go through and clean out the software drawers. I tossed a BUNCH of old CDs, and have some more that I’ll ask Sam about when he returns. We don’t honestly need programs that came with the first sound card I ever bought (1994ish?), or a bluzillion copies of Win9x or Office 97. I don’t know why I have a hard time getting rid of such things, but I figure I should do it while I’m in the mood!

I’m thinking about putting together a file or something similar for each machine we own, with its OS and driver disks. If we get rid of the PC, we can send all that stuff with it easily. It’ll all be in one place when it’s time for a rebuild, as well.

I haven’t even begun to approach the boxes of floppies. There’s one for re-use and another that is actually original driver discs and such. I can’t truly imagine that we NEED anything so old that its driver came on a floppy, though.

We upgraded the RAM and hard drive when we bought the laptop, so it’s actually equal or better to my desktop PC in those respects The sound and video are quite nice as well.

I did manage to get all my files off the old PC, which will now be rebuilt and become Sam’s primary PC. His prior one has been problematic, as it just isn’t upgradeable at all. It’ll be rebuilt with SUSE Linux, most likely. It will probably become the guest room PC, as the former guest room PC is in the kitchen now.

We were going to use the Power Mac we were given recently in the kitchen, then we decided to put it in the guest room. The monitor is HUGE, though, and nobody wants to carry it upstairs. I realized yesterday that an old friend, Bryan, may need it. I think he’s been using the same Mac for many, many years. He’s an artist and uses PhotoShop a LOT, so I’m going to see if this Mac would be an upgrade for him. Now I just have to get hold of him. I’m not sure I have current contact information for him. I do wish I’d thought of that before ordering a NIC for it, though.

It took HOURS to go through the email backlog, even with being ruthless about deleting most list mail unread. I find most homeschooling lists to be marvelous sources of information, but most of them are also very high traffic. I don’t like reading lists as digests—I find that I just delete them immediately.

Since I’ve unsubscribed from many lists, there were less than a thousand unread messages. Barely. But that’s better than it would have been six months ago!

Samba is being asinine. I think it heard me talking about rebuilding the server, and got all pissy. It just stops working at times. First, it was just randomly shutting down print services, now the whole thing goes away. There was a hard drive space issue, but I deleted many gigs of files, so that shouldn’t matter now.

Cyn is Rick's wife, Katie's Mom, and Esther & Oliver's Mémé. She's also a professional geek, avid reader, fledgling coder, enthusiastic gamer (TTRPGs), occasional singer, and devoted stitcher.
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