Back in Business

As I last reported, my beloved old Dell Monster Machine gasped its last breath. Within two days, the delivery guy brought my new computer, Dell Monster Machine version 2.0, to my door.

That was a week ago. One week, more money than I want to think about, days of file restoration, and a variety of curse words later, I'm back to where I was before the old compute went kaput.

I liked how my old machine was set up. I liked the software I had installed on it. I didn't have to think about how to do stuff on it. I just clicked and tapped and things happened the way I wanted.

My first victory (of sorts) was installing my ancient Office 2003 software. Yay! It installed! Boo... all the updates to make it compatible with newer versions are no longer supported. This means I can still use it on my WIP (work in progress), but I can't open documents from other sources. Okay, I can. I download them onto my laptop, save to Dropbox, and then open them on the new machine. A lot of work. So I installed Microsoft Office 365. Haven't played with it yet, but it's there.

I'm still using 2003 for now.

There were all my other programs: Quicken, Scrivener, Scapple. Had to transfer my antivirus software to the new computer. Install Dropbox. Some required buying new licenses. Some took simply remembering passwords.

We won't discuss passwords. Because I can't remember passwords.

And finally there's Carbonite.

I pay a yearly fee to Carbonite to back up my entire computer for just such an occasion as this. Let me say, I love Carbonite. It took over TWO DAYS to restore all my files.

I'm now going through those recovered files and deleting most of them. I've been working on decluttering my house. I should have been decluttering my old computer before I had to restore all those ancient files to my new one.

Anyhow, it's all good. I have a new computer. Some new (improved?) versions of my software. For the most part I don't have to think about how to do stuff. I have everything where I want it. I can once again just click and tap to make things happen.

And then the washing machine died. But that's a story for another day.

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