the Way of the Turtle

SETTING UP A NEW COMPUTER -
Let the "Fun" Begin...
Tuesday, June 19, 2012

I would say that I hate buying new computers as much as I hate buying new cars, but my old Subaru lasted 13 years before I gave up and replaced it, and it's only been 10 years for my Dell PC... of course during that 10 years I've installed and upgraded multiple hard drives, every bit of RAM the thing would take, and oodles of other odds-and-ends. In fact, if Dell wasn't so fixated on proprietary hardware I would probably have upgraded just about everything inside the case by now instead of spending increasing amounts of time swearing at it as it seemingly gets slower and slower... Instead, when I recently found myself with a bit of inherited money, I shelled out for a shiny new HP PC which has been sitting in its box in my living room for the last week, waiting for me to have the time and space to get it set up.

And really, that's the part of the new computer I hate - setting the blasted thing up so that it will do all the stuff my old one does, but faster and hopefully better.

Didn't do much with it tonight, but I've already run into two programs that I use a lot that don't get along with Windows 7. Checked into upgrading them, don't like the reasonably-priced options (or the expensive options, for that matter!) I also found out that this version of Win 7 only supports 16 GB of RAM, meaning one of the DIMMs I dropped in as an upgrade is currently doing zip. But researching that convinced me to shell out some additional money for an upgrade to the next level of Win 7, which not only supports a lot more RAM but also has the option of a Windows XP "virtual machine" which might allow me to run programs I use that don't play nicey nice with Win 7. (Apparently, the next level of Win 7 is already on my new computer - what I paid for tonight is a box containing an access code to turn it on. A fairly clever bit of cost-saving work on the part of Microsoft...)

Sadly, I still have a lot of work to do before the new PC can take the place of the Dell dinosaur in my office (which may find itself retiring to run a bunch of the old games I have - not that I ever really play the things any more - and the wireless router) - there's still a lot of software to load, a TB or so worth of files to transfer (guess I better get the 2nd hard drive up and running in the new PC) and the office itself needs to be cleaned up and reorganized. Gah!

JMH