Friday 4 September 2015

#Familiarise Firday meets MY NEW LAPTOP!

It's a happy #Familiarise Friday

but....AARGH!
www.123rf.com
I'm smiling because my 'New Laptop' has arrived, and in honour of that my #Familiarise Friday slot is all about meeting my new lappie! 

Similar to meeting my #Familiarise Friday authors, I'll be getting to know my new laptop.

However, sometimes my #Familiarise Friday authors are ones I already know a little bit. In like vein, I'm going to already be familiar with some aspects of my new lappie because it has been particularly chosen to NOT be too different.

That's the happy bit but the pessimist in me is showing its ugly horns as well, and here's why...

My current HP laptop is rapidly ageing and I'm told it's contributing to the whole scenario of my slow internet activity. Waiting for the grinding, grinding loading of applications like Facebook or Blogger or Pinterest is almost physically painful. I've been so frustrated at losing lots and lots of seconds and minutes of writing time which is extremely precious to me, during what is always a busy week filled with non-writing activities like grandchildming and weather-dependent gardening. 

I've seen a slowing down of other non-internet applicaions when loading a Word doc, or when processing images, but I wonder how many of you tap-tappers out there are like me and expect a bit more than 4 and 1/2 years out of a laptop?

For months (read at least a year's worth) I've been blaming BT internet for my slow communication speed but it seems they're only partly to blame. Having elected in to BT's total Broadband (Infinity) back around May, I found that my wireless communication was little better than before. What could I do next, I thought, to improve my computer time efficiency? A wired communication was a possibility at my desk but installing that in a nearly 200 year old granite house that isn't as easy as it may sound. However...in came the engineer to install the fastest possible broadband cable directly to my writing table so that my laptop was pluggged up to the 'fastest available' connection.

Did that help? Yes, but in a limited sense only in that my connections didn't fail so often but the loading was/is still very slow at times. So I have to accept that I need to improve more than my internet provision.
www.123rf.com

I've been dreading the expense of buying a new laptop but I'm dreading even more than that. I'm currently connected to so many internet applications, many having happened much to my surprise since I didn't really know what I was doing when I asked for applications to talk to each other. Like this blog post appearing on Google+ and so on... Being un-techy savvy isn't much fun when installing a brand new laptop so it's just as well the basics can be done by my hubby!

Keeping hundreds of passwords in my head isn't my forte either and that's going to be a nightmare if I can't reconnect to sites that I still want to be associated with. That lovely little prompt from my computer asking 'Do you want me to remember this password?' is sooooooo easy to use.

Hands up if you tend towards using that neat trick as well? 

I'm an old dog who likes to only learn a few new tricks. I've heard so much about everyone hating to use Word 2010 and I'm really familiar with my tried and trusted Word 2007. Windows 8 has such horrible stories attached to it that I don't want to venture down that line either. And what about my Web browser? Well, I've not used Google Chrome before so it looks like I'm having a go at that.

My weekend will consist of selling my books at a Craft Fair in the beautiful seaside town of Stonehaven where I'm hoping to sell loads because the profits from my booksales for the last year has vanished into running costs like a new laptop! The rest of the time this weekend, I'm guessing, will be spent transferring all of my hundreds of files and applications to my new laptop. 

Here's to being able to talk to you soon and wishing you all a happy weekend!

Slainthe! 

1 comment:

  1. While expensive, replacing laptops is largely unavoidable - web and program designers often try to make full use of the latest and greatest hardware, leaving older models to struggle to perform properly (to say nothing of the physical wear and tear that happens naturally as well). With the amount of writing you do, though, I'd say it's a worthy investment.

    Raymond @ CKS Global Solutions LTD

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