New Laptop & Old Age

It happens to everyone sooner or later. Your trusty, loyal, old laptop won’t last forever. It’ll have to be replaced. Younger people look forward to the day when they can get their hands on a faster, sleeker, up-to-date, fully loaded, technologically current laptop. Not me. When it comes to technology, I subscribe to the “less is more” school of thought. I would keep my old laptop forever if I could, but built in obsolescence and advances in technology are both working against me. So, after five and a half years I decided to allow my old laptop to go into semi-retirement and buy myself a new one.

I ordered the new laptop on Black Friday and it arrived about a week later. My brother also got the same one at the same time. My thinking is, if I can’t figure something out he will know what to do if we both own the same model. So, I deliver my brother’s laptop to his house and let him set his up. He soon begins offering to set mine up and I kept making excuses. “Take your time, and figure yours out first.” Then I told him I was putting up the tree and couldn’t concentrate on two things at once. Then there were the holidays, and no time for laptops between presents and eating. Well, the holidays are over and so were my excuses. Today my brother came to set up the new laptop.

The first issue with Windows 8.1 is a big purple screen pops up with all sorts of colorful boxes. I don’t like it. I want my old desktop screen so I know where everything is. He tells me to hit the control button. Up pops a screen asking me for the password to the computer. I enter that and I can’t even tell you what happens next. I keep telling him I want my desk top. He makes it appear. It used to appear by itself when I hit the power button on the old laptop. Never mind. Now I want to see where my programs are, the ones I use to blog. Oh, he says, see this little house at the bottom? Click on that and all your programs pop up. Just like that. I demand to see where various programs are, and he shows me. Fine. Now, I need to see my new word processing program. There it is, Word 2013, with all its bells and whistles. So, how do I set a permanent font and pitch? He doesn’t know. We spend 15 minutes playing around until we figure out I have to create a “Style 1,” with those specs, that I can click on before typing any document. Great. Now I ask if he can make Google Chrome open automatically when I start the computer. We can’t figure out how to make it do that. No way. I set all my important tabs on Google Chrome and I know how to save them, he doesn’t. One point for me. Mind you, with the old laptop I would hit the power button and it would start up, AIM and Google Chrome (and all my tabs) would open up while I had breakfast. I didn’t need a password to get into my computer and all my programs popped up with the start button. My desktop screen was right behind Google Chrome. Everything was at my old finger tips. Now I have to be a magician to make things appear. And this is just Day 1 of what have I gotten myself into.

There is nothing like a new laptop to make you feel as old as the hills and then some. This little blog is just for practice. Sigh. I guess I should be glad I accomplished something today.

UPDATE:
 
I had a couple of hours the next morning before going to a party. I turn on the NEW computer, take care of my various email, tweets, FB messages, games, etc. Then I take a shower. Go back to the computer and see "Plugged in NOT charging" So I am not a happy camper. I check all the connections to see if any are loose. Nope. So I move the computer to the outlet I used yesterday, where everything worked fine. It's charging a couple of minutes, then "Plugged in, NOT charging" again. What can I do? I take out the battery and put it back in, then plug everything in. It's charging for a couple of minutes, then I get the message again! It happens a few more times. I contact my brother. I can't be bothered with this today, I have plans. He has the exact same computer and no issue. I take the computer over to his house so he can work on it. TWO HOURS LATER I get a message from my brother. He is calling customer service. After he explains the problem, they say they will fix it "remotely." So, after 30 minutes on the phone with them, he is told the driver that was installed for the power was NOT compatible with Windows. They removed the wrong driver and put in the right driver (the one my brother seems to already have in his). My brother continued to run the power down and recharge to see if there is any problem with my computer. So far problem solved. I'll pick it up from my brother's tomorrow. Hopefully...the end.