Ever Had to Get Your Own Back?

(It just means I’ve been running so fast,
in circles, I finally caught myself…)

Today is the first day of the rest of my life, I hope.

I’ve never been tested for patience like I have in the last few weeks. You know my old laptop lost Internet connectivity and I was forced to research, find, buy, and install a new one. And I’ve been forced to use a teensy ol’ netbook just for keeping up with comments, bless its little heart.

Let me tell you what it was like…

I was checking on comments and emails one morning, long ago, and had taken a break for breakfast, returning to y’all at 10:30 or so, when I could not get on the Internet for anything. It just would not go. I tried a patch cord to a router, and that worked for about five minutes, and then–kaput.

To keep up with my adoring fans, I had to resort to a teensy netbook I’d found at a good used stuff store for cheap. It is so small, one friend called it my “Pocket Calculator”. (I had to find my high-powered sewing glasses!) It works in black and white, no gray tones, and let me tell you, you have to know your way around on the Internet, especially on facebook, to go without color. (All the edit tools on fb are in slightly darker shades of color, so they disappear on my little baby computer. I had to hover around all the time, trying to get the hot spots to ignite so I could edit my many typos on facebook.) I could not read page stats on fb, since the graphs are not in black&white.

Posting, here, was nigh impossible, although I did manage one shortie.

First came soul searching.

I did not want to keep on blogging if it wasn’t what I’m supposed to do. I was a happy soul before blogging and had entered the electric communications world with heels dragging; I wondered if God was trying to tell me something. My husband and I had several discussions and decided to keep on keeping on. That was a weird time, but I survived.

Disclaimer: I am not working for anybody who sells anything I’ve mentioned here! What a joke that would be! I would lose them customers. I don’t even like computers. No, I’m just a happy camper who cannot stop talking. So sorry if you were looking for someone to censor, look elsewhere. I’m only writing this because my non-techy friends want to know how it went for me.

Next was trying to find the right product.

I never was deliriously happy with the tool that was my old laptop, but always figured that was because I never was deliriously happy with this tool we call “Internet”. I sent out an APB for information about what to buy and kept getting the same word from the most trusted places, so delved into the purchase.

At our local “Best Buy” store was a good place to start with their friendly help and rather large selection. We do not like to buy things “sight unseen”, do not like to window shop in catalogs. We had a brand in mind and our IT guy (our youngest son) had recently bought exactly what everyone was recommending and was loving it. And he’s picky.

The PURCHASE!

With no small wave of trepidation, we made a decision, and yes, we bought at Best Buy, for which we are quite happy, as they surprised us with a $50 rebate at the cash register. Wow. Nice.

The price was right.

I did not select the $600 beauty that my IT guy recommended. No. It was the enormously less expensive “notebook” version that caught our frugal attentions. All the same features, sans gaming (yay), for much, much less. And there was that in-store rebate…

The WAIT!

Yes, we brought home a new computer. No, I did not open it for weeks. Why?

I did not want to open the sealed box containing my new toy until I was sure I had Mr. IT’s blessings, and stuff came up to keep us apart.

1. We had a big Father’s Day get together.
2. We took a small vacation.
3. I had canning out of my ears. Heh. And still do.
4. Mr. IT was out of pocket.
5. We got company.
6. Our dear local librarian needed facebook page HELP!
7. Unknown to me, my cell phone stopped receiving texts. Must be something in the air?
8. I know there was more that I am forgetting.

The Plot Thickens!

It was my brother of the famed French Toast who visited after we’d made our purchase, and he is quite the expert, himself, and in the course of fooling around with my broken computer, he fixed it.

Huh.

I’m not so cool on rapidly thickening plots when they happen to me . . . .

But I was really glad I had not opened the new one, yet.

In the end, we made a carefully thought out decision to go forward with the new machine, on the advice of my brother and of Mr. IT. My old one might goof up again, at any moment, since we could not figure out what messed it up the first time. It was really old and would soon be outdated and slow. Its keyboard had a couple of irritating keys that did not fire dependably, making me look like a very poor typist, indeed (instead of just a regular poor typist), and it was so old they no longer made replacement keyboards for it.

We open the box!

Actually, I could not bear to open it after being half scared to for so long, so Mr. IT did it for me. We watched him zoom through all the data mazes he’d just mastered while initiating his own similar laptop, and loved seeing the gleam in his eyes–a shining knowledge of what he was doing.

I’d have had a dull film of weary irritation and confusion over my eyes, had I been doing the same tasks. In fact, I’ve been known to crash a brand new computer while trying to turn it on…

It’s LOVE!

I knew I would love my new computer when I got engaged to it at the Best Buy, but now that we’re married, I’m totally hooked on getting to know this thing. Here’s why:

1. Touch screen. Although this screen will have to be de-smeared from time to time, OH MY, does it simplify computer work!!! As Mr. IT says, if you can reach it, you can make it go. All I can say is go to a computer place, try out a touch screen, and you’ll see. It does take some getting used to, but I’m ready to grow up, here.
2. Touch screen with “Paint”. What this means is that you can select a color and drag your finger all over the page in the Paint program, and DRAW. It’s far above its old “etchasketch” un-usefulness, now.
3. Touch screen with a stylus. You know all those new pens that have floppy, semi-translucent erasers that don’t erase? That’s a stylus and it is for navigating a touch phone when your fingers are too big to let them do the walking. And it works on this computer, oh MY! It also turns Paint into a really useful artistic outlet because it is very nearly like using a crayon, pencil, or brush in your hands.
4. The new PhotoDirector application that makes me look like some kinda pro! No excuses for wimpy photos, ever again! I cannot wait to master this one.
5. Speed. I need speed. Living in the Arkansas Outback, I am on what the techies love to call “the last mile”. It’s one of the white dots on the service maps that show most of the USA is red, except where I live, which almost does not have any service at all. A blogger’s nightmare and a writer’s dream come true.
   But with this new computer, I get service. Whew.
6. Slim and trim. This machine has no DVD player. That’s fine. I don’t do DVD’s when I’m blogging, socializing, or emailing, and I don’t do computers when I’m not. If I wanted to watch a movie or listen to a song, my old laptop still does that just fine. But I hardly have the time, anymore, so . . . my laptop has gone on a diet and looks very wonderfully thin.
7. Light weight. This I love: I can pick it up with one hand, even if my arm is extended and my joints are aching today. Yay.
8. Smaller. Fits into almost any purse that has nothing else in it. Which means all sorts of cute options for carrying it around. Ha.

Okay. You want to know what I got. It is an ASUS X200M notebook. And the model number there was very nearly the price.

What’s not to love, since I now know where my sewing glasses are?!

And this is the end of the post telling of the saga of my finding a new computer. Enjoy!

Oh, and just a peek at the competition: