Shiny new 'puter, whee!
Hah! I actually have/had a good reason for not being on lj, over and beyond being a bit rubbish at keeping up (and ignoring the fact I can read it on my phone or tablet, but never remember to do so..). Yes, sad to say my old PC finally bit the dust with a rather dramatic bang. Eep! Didn't hold out much hope the poor 12 year old machine was fixable but got a techy guy out to swap the PSU but the motherboard was fried. Rather whimpery about that whole aspect until I pulled myself together, counted my pennies (thank $deity for emergency savings) and realised that *actually* this was a Good Thing(tm), for it meant shiny! new! 'puter! Ooh. Which given how much I have been moaning of late about the resembles-molasses-ness of my old machine meant it was high time for a change.
There has been confusion, and wibbling, and much recognition of the fact my tech knowledge is woefully out of date but thanks to some helpful input from various folks on FB and in real life, I plumped for a shiny new Intel i5 machine with 8Gb RAM, 1TB of hard drive and Windows 7, thankfully - the amount of hate for Windows 8 is over and above the usual "I dislike Microsoft for mucking with the familiar".
PC finally arrived on Wednesday, I was ill that day but poked it a bit to see where the cables should go, made a list and ran away.
Thursday I was in town for pre-birthday shopping but sat down that evening and quietly put all the cables in place - colour coding does make it idiot proof, thankfully, though I could have done without the crawling on the floor with the speakers (the crawling's not to bad, its getting a wobbly hobbit safely back up that's the challenge...).
And this morning I pressed the ON button. Oooh, so brave! *giggle*
Happily playing with the new shiny now, its bloody fast and so efficient, even with my slow broadband I can stream my music from the amazon cloud player and browse the net and be installing software and all kinds of things without the machine grinding to a halt. To be fair, a winXP machine with only 500Mb of RAM is pretty pathetic these days so I'm not surprised. And my flatscreen monitor looks great too - was a bit concerned about the brightness of same as I'd some fiddly extra settings on it previously courtesy of Mark as it was bothering my eyes but Windows 7 clearly handles modern monitors with aplomb.
So yeah, new shiny, whee! And set up as far as it needs to be all ready for my online course in Android programming via the FutureLearn people that starts this Monday - not surprising I'm feeling a lot less stressed now I'm sorted.
Just need to sort out getting the old drives out of the old machine to use as externals and drag the data off, but fingers crossed they didn't get fried when the machine died, then I can copy my photos, mp3s etc. That's for later though, need to save up to pay a techy guy to help, for starters.
Damn this thing's impressively swift :)
There has been confusion, and wibbling, and much recognition of the fact my tech knowledge is woefully out of date but thanks to some helpful input from various folks on FB and in real life, I plumped for a shiny new Intel i5 machine with 8Gb RAM, 1TB of hard drive and Windows 7, thankfully - the amount of hate for Windows 8 is over and above the usual "I dislike Microsoft for mucking with the familiar".
PC finally arrived on Wednesday, I was ill that day but poked it a bit to see where the cables should go, made a list and ran away.
Thursday I was in town for pre-birthday shopping but sat down that evening and quietly put all the cables in place - colour coding does make it idiot proof, thankfully, though I could have done without the crawling on the floor with the speakers (the crawling's not to bad, its getting a wobbly hobbit safely back up that's the challenge...).
And this morning I pressed the ON button. Oooh, so brave! *giggle*
Happily playing with the new shiny now, its bloody fast and so efficient, even with my slow broadband I can stream my music from the amazon cloud player and browse the net and be installing software and all kinds of things without the machine grinding to a halt. To be fair, a winXP machine with only 500Mb of RAM is pretty pathetic these days so I'm not surprised. And my flatscreen monitor looks great too - was a bit concerned about the brightness of same as I'd some fiddly extra settings on it previously courtesy of Mark as it was bothering my eyes but Windows 7 clearly handles modern monitors with aplomb.
So yeah, new shiny, whee! And set up as far as it needs to be all ready for my online course in Android programming via the FutureLearn people that starts this Monday - not surprising I'm feeling a lot less stressed now I'm sorted.
Just need to sort out getting the old drives out of the old machine to use as externals and drag the data off, but fingers crossed they didn't get fried when the machine died, then I can copy my photos, mp3s etc. That's for later though, need to save up to pay a techy guy to help, for starters.
Damn this thing's impressively swift :)