And in other news...

It's a long story but the other week I stupidly damaged my laptop.  It's still working though, apart from a damaged screen, but now the touchpad has decided to start messing with my mind.  Today I invested in a wireless mouse.  Now I've never had one of these before but I'm quite impressed - yes I'm easily amused. 

I've decided to wait until June before having it repaired, for the sole reason that February to May is the most crucial period of the year - national finals, Eurovision, spring holiday planning, summer holiday planning - in other words it's a time not to be separated from ye olde laptop and all the worry about how long a repair will take.  And then of course when it's wired up to the telly with the HDMI cable, all is well :)

Dead Laptops Society (continued)

This is all a bit #firstworldproblems for which I can only apologise!

So anyway, self-determined digital detox is fine, but not when it's forced on you.  Especially the week before our holiday, when the control freak that I am goes into overdrive and needs to research every aspect of a trip.

In these days of smartphones and tablets, people may question the need to have a laptop at all.  But there's a lot of tasks which you need a laptop for, apart from the internet.  I do a lot of "word processing" as it was once quaintly known back in the day.  You can't print to your old-school wired printer, or scan to your old-school scanner, or access that digitised recipe archive.  You can't shop and print off that confirmation email.  You can't watch obscure telly clips with the hdmi wired up to the telly.  So there in so many words this is my digital life, my friends.  Which needs a laptop.

Anyway, it was out with the old ....

...the seemingly future-proof Acer Aspire.  I thought we would grow old together, being parted only for system upgrades as and when.  But that was not to happen, as it came to the end of its life just 3½ years after its arrival.  For this is 2013 and electrical equipment is not built to last - that's how the manufacturers make their money after all.  A computer is almost instantly obsolete the day after you buy it, depreciating in value to zilch with the arrival of faster processors, bigger memory, bigger drives. 

In with the new....

...just a few days before my holiday.  It's an HP Pavilion G6, and it's purple.  Which is a bonus as you know that's my favourite colour, but I bought it for the specifications which were pretty decent as at mid-September 2013.  The down side is that it's running Windows 8 which screams AVOID!AVOID!AVOID! as some bright spark seemed to think we wanted apps instead of the conventional start screen.  Well, that kind of thing's all very well for the smartphone and tablet brigade but is pretty useless with a conventional non-touchscreen laptop with a mouse pad.  But I'm not going to let it beat me and I'm determined to get to grips with it (and bought a book to help me).  Apart from that, we have bonded well and after the usual teething problems of reinstalling various programs and software, things are running smoothly so far.  I wonder how long this one will last?

Meanwhile, I've started up a savings fund and putting by a couple of quid per week to save up for the next one....! #ohyeoflittlefaith

Some thoughts from today

It started off very badly with a recurring household repair/emergency resulting in me having to take a day off work, but at least I tried to make the best of my sitting-around-waiting time by continuing to learn new wonderful things about my new(ish) phone, and continuing to catch up with my Winter Olympics backlog (only a week of it still to watch - that's the worst of living in a different time zone)

And still in gadgets-ville, some good news: last weekend I made the decision to buy a new computer - a laptop - replacing my trusty but now failing desktop dinosaur (born 2001, and soon to depart 2010). After much deliberation and comparing which resulted in my eyes almost popping out my head last night, the decision was made to go for a state of the art futureproof model - which presumably means that it won't become obsolete until, ooh, at least April 2010.

Anyway it's due to arrive tomorrow!

So I probably won't be around too much in the next few days as I'll be bonding with the new arrival, installing programs, getting my internet up and running and the like...between now and Friday I'll probably do most of my blogging and tweeting from work.

Stress, sick computers and Swedish stuff

That kind of sums up my life at the minute.

There are not enough hours in the day: I am, officially, stressed out.

Then there is the small matter of my old geriatric home computer not working properly. The internet is hanging by a thread but a combination of haywire-drivers and a load of little problems all turning into one big problem means only one thing...a reformat could be on the cards. On the plus side, at least I've backed up everything on the external drive - but on the down side it means I'll lose all my updated programs and (sob) iTunes which will need reinstalled.

Bit of deja vu now: as with almost the same time last year, my firstborn blog EuropeCrazy is running on a very limited service at the moment as everything is being concentrated on Planet Salem for the foreseeable future (well, the next 4-5 weeks in any case). Normal service will be resumed at some point, I've got a big backlog of old posts which I'm going to publish at some point, I just don't know when.

And I've now got an Olympics backlog to watch!

Bear with me ;)

Unwinding and upgrading

Having two days off work purely for relaxation purposes...and enjoying every minute.

Currently celebrating the fact that I have successfully downloaded Internet Explorer 8. The last time I tried to upgrade my Internet Explorer, I completely lost the internet altogether :(

Also still coming to terms with the fact that it now takes me about 20 minutes from switching on the computer to getting everything to work, thanks to upgrading my anti-virus a few weeks ago.

But anyway everything is working, and that's the main thing :)

Computer-free Thursday (not)

As part of my get-my-life-in-order time management strategy (ha ha) I had decided during my blog-break that I'd take one night a week out of any kind of contact with a computer - no internet/email/typing/scanning...nothing at all. So I came up with computer-free Thursday and it's been working for the last couple of weeks. But obviously not tonight.

I need something to take my mind off this heat, I guess....thankfully it won't be high-20s tomorrow, the forecast is for good old rain and 20 degrees.

I hate the rain but this time I think I might just run outside and dance in it :))))