I know that it has been awhile since I have written anything and you may have come to the conclusion that my return to writing online was short lived. Even I can admit that such an assumption would not be unreasonable to make. However, that wasn’t the case.
On April 11, my computer decided that it had worked enough. It had been a reliable machine, one I have been using for several years. But it was starting to show its age. Well, actually it started to show its age a couple of years ago. But on April 11 I had trouble getting it to boot up. After getting someone who could see to tell me the problem I learned that a dll file was missing and no matter what I did to try and fix the situation (E.G. starting in safe mode) the screen would just go to black and nothing would happen.
I was hoping to get 2 more months out of that machine. If I could get it to July I felt like the time would be right for me to replace it with a new desktop. The July date had more to do with finances than anything else. Honestly, I think that if I let someone who knew more about computers than I take a look at the situation, something might have been able to be done to get it running. But considering I was getting ready to replace it anyway and that I had just gotten my stimulus check, I figured I would just bite the bullet and get a new machine.
Fortunately for me, I didn’t lose a lot from that computer. Most of the files I really needed were stored on external drives and all of those were fine. There were a couple of documents that I lost but those could be recreated easily enough and most everything else had been backed up recently because of my plan to replace it soon.
Instead of a new desktop, I ended up replacing it with an inexpensive Laptop. I don’t use my computer for a lot of things, surfing the Internet, checking my email, word processing and spreadsheet capabilities and a couple of other things is about it. So the Laptop I got has been more than upto the task so far.
I was reluctant to get a Laptop. I had been talking with friends about what my next machine would be and the debate I was having over whether or not to get a Desktop or Laptop. I’ve always been more fond of Desktop computers and I liked my last one a lot which was an all-in-one machine. The pro of a Laptop for me was also the Con. In that a Laptop is something I can easily take with me when I travel and that’s nice. But the con is that one thing I liked about going away was getting away from the computer for awhile. But that’s easy enough to reconcile, I can take my Laptop with me when I go places but it isn’t requred that I do so. But given that I haven’t had an over night trip out of town in years, this probably isn’t going to be something I worry about all that much.
So I got my new Laptop on April 12. I was able to set it up pretty quickly and have spent the last couple of weeks rearranging things, mostly moving files from one External drive to another. I just got an External DVD/CD drive from Amazon which was necessary because I stil get a lot of government documents on CD.
I did have to recreate a lot of iTunes playlists. My list of Christmas and Thanksgiving episodes were the biggest headaches. Thankfully, I had all of the information I needed to recreate them written down so recreating them took much less time than actually making them in the first place. Other than that, I have mostly been trying to get used to Windows 10 as my old machine ran Windows 7. It has gone pretty well so far, thankfully.
Other than that, not a lot has been going on. Things have been relatively peaceful on all fronts. I still have a post in my drafts foler that I am waiting to publish about something that I found out about in February and has left me counting down the days until July.
The NFL draft starts tomorrow. I used to look forward to the draft every year and I used to make sure I watched every minute of it. However, this year I think there is a pretty good chance I won’t watch any of it and that hasn’t happened since 2012 when I was out of town during the draft and it slipped my mind because I was really busy.
I hope to be back with a new post very soon but other than the one in my draft folder I don’t know that I have a lot to say. Things in my life right now are pretty stable. I like that but it doesn’t exactly make for compelling writing. There’s only so many ways you can say that this week was a lot like last week and I expect next week to be the same. I’m thinking about some ways to break up the routine a bit but nothing is on the immediate horizon. Until next time, be well.
Random Catastrophe Version 3.0 