So my old computer quit on me last week. In recent days, it began freezing up with increasing frequency, even when I wasn’t doing anything major. A forced reboot, and everything would be good for a little while. But the freezing started happening sooner and sooner after reboot.
And then it actually began freezing up sometimes during the boot process. Everything pointed to a hardware problem, but from what I read, it could be a number of things–the hard drive, a bad capacitor, the power supply, or the motherboard. The computer was over 6 years old, so I didn’t see any point in trying to investigate the problem any further.
I backed up what little was not already backed up, just before the computer died for good. My first inclination was to buy directly from HP. And if the old computer had still been functioning, I would have. But shipping would take at least a week, and I didn’t want to wait that long. So I found a reasonably good one at Walmart, and for a slightly lower price than I had planned on spending.
So I have had my new computer for a few days now. I think I have figured out most of the major differences between Windows 7 and Windows 10.
It’s amazing how much faster a USB 3.0 port makes transferring files.
Painful, ain’t it? My laptop is hanging on at the moment, but I think its days may be numbered. I don’t dare allow Windows updates, as I had BSOD trouble when I let it upgrade to 8.1, and was lucky to recover functionality. My last PC went to shit late last year and I replaced it with an iMac 27. So far, it works well, but compatibility between my Excel documents and Apple’s database program is really, really poor; so when I replace this laptop, I’m going to go with a Windows based replacement so that I can still access those older documents.
After years of just bearing it through clenched teeth, my office finally replaced our computers after our fleet of c.2004 Dells running XP couldn’t be upgraded to support our business management software. My days of watching my computer spend ten minutes grinding through the process of sending a 3mb PDF civil plan out to the big printer are finally behind me.
The new computers are running Win7 which is fine by me but there’s lots of weird finicky things that pop up when you go from a system you’re used to a new (better) one. Like the large scale plotter defaulting to portrait mode unless I run a print preview and the other printer/scanner deciding it only sometimes wants to acknowledge its document feeder. Little bits of weirdness that will eventually get worked out – or I’ll just get used to, I guess.
