Getting To Know You

Well, actually, I'm getting to know my laptop. I am actually writing this post on it. So far, so good.

I got the laptop on Wednesday and spent that night and Thursday getting it to behave like my desktop--or, at least, as close as possible. I put Thunderbird and Firefox on here and changed all the settings to make it as familiar as I could. I even put my Red Wings background as wallpaper! It all seemed to be going okay and then some glitches reared their ugly heads--only ONE of which I was responsible for creating. I couldn't figure my way out of the mess I was in, so I had to restore this thing back to the way it was when I got it--two days worth of work down the drain!

On Friday I restored everything back to original and started all over again. Luckily, I had just been through everything, so it took much less time to work on settings, etc. All was going well and then a program started to try to update itself and I kept getting error messages and nothing I did worked. By that time, I was tired and shut down for the night.

Saturday evening I finally felt up to trying again. I vowed to myself that I WAS NOT going to call tech support. Sorry, but most of them don't know much more than I do about how to fix these problems. And the reason I say this is, their first and "best" fix for any problem is reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling the OS. Not gonna happen if I can help it! So I decided to find a solution on my own and turned to Google. Turns out, the problem I had wasn't all that uncommon and it was easily fixed. This brought me to a conclusion: computer manufacturers PURPOSELY have sent their tech support overseas so that we won't use it--we can't understand most of them, anyway. This forces us to try to fix the problem on our own--which might or might not happen. Best case scenario is that you can find a solution, as I did. OR you can screw the thing up so much that you have to pay the manufacturer to fix it, and this helps them make more money. A method to the madness.

Although this thing is pretty close to how my desktop is, it still isn't the same--and never will be. I'm having some problems with configuring one of my email accounts, but it really doesn't matter: I can just go online to check it. Also, I will never be able to do some of the things on this that I can on my desktop: photo editing and storage, or storing a lot of music. But, that's what a desktop is for. While I'm happy with this laptop, it isn't what I REALLY want. (See the post from 21 November 2005.) It isn't nearly as powerful as I want, but it is more than adequate for what I NEED. Let's have a drumroll, people, and then you can follow this link to see my newest baby, a Dell Inspiron E1505! (Mine is the second one from the right--the one that says it's for music and pictures.) Pretty, isn't it?