Things one forgets about owning a new computer

[kylinn]

I haven't bought an entire new system in *years*. How many, I'm not sure, but at least five; maybe more.

The box I currently use began life - in the 'my grandfather's axe' way - as an HP Pavilion. Over the years we've replaced literally everything except the keyboard. New RAM, new hard drives, new motherboard, power supply, CD-ROM drive, new case (to fit the new motherboard) etc. etc. It's not a wonderful computer by today's standards - "just" 800 mhz, total 45 gig hard drives, 256 meg RAM (1) - but it's done all right.

So, my main drive is dying, and I really need to upgrade to be able to be compatible with what I'm using at work. This means going from Win98, original ed., to WinXP Pro. With the prices what they are, I decided to order a whole new box.

Anyway, as it's the C drive that's failing, I've got most of the software and files I want to save copied onto my D drive. And I've been planning to add that drive to the new computer.

So yesterday I was talking with malada and she said something about adding the new computer (when it arrives) to the bitsy LAN we have so I can transfer my old files over.

And I said, Huh? I thought we'd just move the D drive to the new machine.

And she says, Oh, okay. We'll go out and get you a box for it and cabling to you can run it from a USB port.

And I say, again, Huh? Why, I say, can't we just pop it inside the new machine. There will be a couple of spare bays, according to the specs.

And she says, But if we open the box, we void the warranty.

DUH!

*smack-self-in-head*

Y'know, it's been so long since I had a computer with a warranty, that little factor escaped me entirely.

The things one forgets....

(1) Of course, when I compare it to my first computer - 2 meg of RAM! a 120 meg hard drive! a 2400 baud modem! - it blows the latter out of the water. But that's neither here nor there.

Comments

[scascot.livejournal.com]

Of course, when I compare it to my first computer - 2 meg of RAM! a 120 meg hard drive! a 2400 baud modem! - it blows the latter out of the water.

Timex/Sinclair 1000. Membrane keyboard. Black & white graphics (bring your own TV to use as a monitor). No sound. Bring your own tape recorder if you want offline storage. No printer. 16K of RAM.

And I thought it teh shiznit when I first got it.

[scascot.livejournal.com]

Oh, and a modem? Whatfer? BBS's barely existed, let alone teh interweb.

[deor.livejournal.com]

I couldn't afford a computer until 1991 or so. By then, being able to connect to the internet was an important feature. My computer came with promo trials for Prodigy, AOL, and CompuServe, and I tried them all.

[manna]

Our first computer (as in, the first one archie_gremlin and I owned) had 40 meg disk drive. It still seems weird to me to have so much more *RAM* in new computers than disk drives used to have.

However, as archie_gremlin has built all the computers we've had since then (except the laptop), we've never had a warranty since then either :-)

[deor.livejournal.com]

That sounds like the computer I used at work for many years through the early 90s. It also had a 40 meg hard drive - partitioned into two 20 meg drives. The word processor was WordPerfect 5.0. Not, notice, 5.1, the update which was released almost immediately after 5.0 to patch its numerous flaws, but the original 5.0, the buggy one. It had an early version of Paradox for a database program, which was so frustrating to work with that I went out and bought a copy of MS Works for DOS and switched to that. Changed to it for word processing, too.

Funny thing is, all these years later, using WinXP at work with Office 2003, I don't find that my data input/output is really all that appreciably much faster. The programs can do fancier things, sure, but for basic operations, the plain old text editors did just about everything I really needed.

[manna]

I do all my fiction editing in NoteTab, which is an HTML editor with no real WP functions at all. I swear I *think* better when I'm looking at ASCII text file :-)

[deor.livejournal.com]

I *love* NoteTab. I do all my HTML editing in NoteTab Pro. Great set of products!

(I do wish they'd let one use variable-space fonts in NTP, though, just like in NTLight. Maybe they think that serious coders using NTP don't need anything but monospace fonts, but, damnit, I'd like to be able to make that decision myself. Other than that, though, it rocks!)

[turnberryknkn.livejournal.com]

And she says, But if we open the box, we void the warranty.

Hee! :-)

Hooray new computing!