A few weeks back my five-year old laptop began to show signs that it wouldn’t be with us much longer. The images on the screen would develop a flicker… Then the lower third of the screen would lighten until it was impossible to see. A good whack would straighten it out, but I could tell it wouldn’t be long before the whack wouldn’t take care of the job. It was time to upgrade.

So… It was laptop shopping time again. Now let me be perfectly clear, I love upgrading to new equipment. I just hate the chore of re-installing all the software that I use on a regular basis. And once you install all of that wonderful software, it all needs to be updated to get you back to where you were to begin with. And since my wife’s laptop was just as old as mine (and she had complained for a while about how s l o w it was acting) I went ahead and picked up one for her, too. Her’s was a standard configuration and shipped next day, mine had a few more geegaws  and wasn’t scheduled to arrive until next week.

Her’s came in and I spent a day moving her files over and setting her computer up the way she was (semi) used to it being (seeing as how she was working on an operating system that was at least three generations old). Then I moved her old machine to the bar thinking I’d start using it on the back porch now that the weather is cooling down…

Yesterday my machine arrived early. So now I’ve spent the better part of a day and a half installing programs, logging into accounts to save passwords and have the machine recognized,and moving files from one machine to the next. I will probably be doing this off and on for the next week or so before I do a purge on the old machine and see how long it lasts as a spare…The really fun part of all of this is chasing down the registry keys needed to unlock all the software I’ve installed over the last five years. It seems I’ve managed to use at least three different email accounts for the software and it makes no rhyme or reason about what software was registered with each account.

And for what is worth, the new laptops, like the old, are Dell’s. I have had good luck over the years using Dell computers and I don’t see any reason to switch now…

Just to change the subject a bit…I really have enjoyed my first cup of coffee these past few days. Sitting on the back porch enjoying the cool morning air is a change from the months of heat and humidity we have suffered through. Though, I am sure many of you wouldn’t be too impressed with what I consider cool air… It was just 67° when I went out this morning. I can’t wait for tomorrow… The prognosticators are predicting a low of  64°…