I recently gave some wise computer advice in a blog. Computers die, so get over it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t that wise. Oh, I got over the slow hard drive access, the blue screens, the error messages, and the agonizing frustration of living with a computer that came to the end of its useful life. The part that was hard to get over was that EVERYTHING changed. No matter how hard I tried to reinstall my programs, restore my desktop and browser layouts, and reestablish the comfortable views in my main programs, it just wasn’t the same.
There are myriad websites, forums, and assorted other assistance sites dedicated to helping one do this, but something usually goes wrong. (That’s why forums have thousands of answers to one simple question: how do I [fill in the blank]?) Yes, restoring a .pst file for all of your Outlook files on a new computer should be easy, but it’s not. Moving to a new operating system prevented me from restoring my old, mirror image hard drive to the new computer. Firefox did a complete makeover in the middle of all this. Proof of purchase and installation keys for many programs had to be copied somewhere in order to access them for reinstallation of programs I already purchased.
So, instead of saying in my last article that “computers die, get over it,” I really should have said, “computers die, get ready to spend hours of your life trying to make the new one acceptable.” Yes, I was happy to leave behind many programs that were just sitting on my hard drive taking up space. Yes, I’m thrilled with the speed and functionality of my new computer. But it took me weeks to get comfortable with this new control center and I still don’t know why I have three identical email accounts in Outlook: email, email(1), and email(2).
Alas, I’m learning as I go. But, (dare I say it?), I kind of like Windows 10. It suits me just fine. I like having the “apps” or “tiles” or “charms” or whatever else they want to call it all available right on my desktop. It took a little getting used to, but with all of the other hoops I had to jump through just to “move” to a new computer, it was pretty easy.
Now, if I could just figure out which calendar has all of my appointments and events in it, which file holds all of my contacts, and which email address I’m sending from, I’ll be golden…until about 3 years from now…which is just about how long it will take me to be completely comfortable with my new computer. And then I’ll be back to handing out wise computer advice again.