Technology, whee
Monday, January 27th, 2020 12:31 amLong story short, the "work" laptop (a different computer than in the last post) went from its usual persnickety functioning to eeeeeeeeeing uncontrollably to not taking input from either keyboard to eeeeeeeeing again to... going dark and refusing to boot. Period.
This was an ex-computer. Of course, no current backup, and I was in the middle of something that needed to be done yesterday.
I decided to take a chance on a local computer store I'd gotten good vibes from on initial scouting, and I'm so glad I did. They managed to clone the old hard drive to a new machine -- in about 24 hours, for a very reasonable fee, and without even a breath of mockery for me wanting an old OS and not wanting to embrace the newest and latest. I'm still playing with the new (well, "new", it's a refurb, but it seems sound so far) machine, but so far everything's working just as it did before. A few settings to tweak here and there, but so far it's just personalization-type stuff, and not even too much of that.
Okay, that's a lot of "so fars"; I'm trying not to jinx anything. But so far (sorry), I'm pretty damned impresed. And I like the machine itself well enough; it's a Dell, which is not my fave, but it's got a nice clicky keyboard and it's very shiny, and actually has better brightness and volume controls than my old Toshiba. Not sure about the screen; I may need to see about an overlay, although tweaking the contrast has been helping. The wifi doesn't detect the 5G, but the non-5G option is not perceptably slower. Need to play with the CD burner and such.
Overall, I can't believe I got off this easy, given how much of my life was/is on that/this machine. I still need to beat the rest of my life into submission, but at least now when I can get some time for convention and career stuff I'll have a computer to do it on.
This was an ex-computer. Of course, no current backup, and I was in the middle of something that needed to be done yesterday.
I decided to take a chance on a local computer store I'd gotten good vibes from on initial scouting, and I'm so glad I did. They managed to clone the old hard drive to a new machine -- in about 24 hours, for a very reasonable fee, and without even a breath of mockery for me wanting an old OS and not wanting to embrace the newest and latest. I'm still playing with the new (well, "new", it's a refurb, but it seems sound so far) machine, but so far everything's working just as it did before. A few settings to tweak here and there, but so far it's just personalization-type stuff, and not even too much of that.
Okay, that's a lot of "so fars"; I'm trying not to jinx anything. But so far (sorry), I'm pretty damned impresed. And I like the machine itself well enough; it's a Dell, which is not my fave, but it's got a nice clicky keyboard and it's very shiny, and actually has better brightness and volume controls than my old Toshiba. Not sure about the screen; I may need to see about an overlay, although tweaking the contrast has been helping. The wifi doesn't detect the 5G, but the non-5G option is not perceptably slower. Need to play with the CD burner and such.
Overall, I can't believe I got off this easy, given how much of my life was/is on that/this machine. I still need to beat the rest of my life into submission, but at least now when I can get some time for convention and career stuff I'll have a computer to do it on.