I bought a new computer because mine was over 3 1/2 years old and I feared a major crash. After researching, decided on another Dell, and stuck with XP after hearing many Vista horror stories.
Spent the better part of two days setting it up, loading and downloading software, transferring files, customizing settings. I even managed to open my old PC and remove the firewire card.
I’m quite proud that I was able to do all this computery stuff myself (with the help of the Internet) tho I confess to several periods of extreme frustration.
The surprises:
–how many programs I use.
–how much updating a brand new computer needs
–all the fairly common software, like iTunes and QuickTime, it didn’t already have.
The good:
–my new Dell is SOOO much quieter than the old. Amazing.
–it’s SOOO much faster, since I went with the new Intel Quad core processor. Amazing.
–love, love, love my wireless mouse.
The bad:
–I turn on my brand new system to see: FATAL EXECUTION ENGINE ERROR.
AARGH! Something to do with the JIT debugger, whatever that is.
Instead of freaking, I clicked cancel.
Everything seems to work fine. Whew.
A bit of Internet research led to a couple of fixes. I tried the easy one, which is unchecking the script debugging boxes under Tools/Internet Options/Advanced …we’ll see if that works. The next way seems to be downloading a dotnetfx.exe file. Hmmm.
–the widescreen monitor, which is awesome for my voiceover recording program Audacity, has the tiniest, most infinitesimal font and many attempts to change the settings/display seem only to affect fonts in randomly selected locations. I fear I’ll need a magnifying glass to read my AOL. Advice, O techies in Internet land?
–can’t get my PC speakers to play music and leave my headphones for recording only, the settings I had on my old PC. Tried and tried.
–let’s just say Word 2007 has quite the learning curve.
–while my wireless keyboard has some nifty features, it doesn’t fit with the nice gel wristpad on my keyboard tray and so far isn’t as comfortable to type on…and some keys are in different places. like end and page up. So far I automatically go to where those keys used to be.
To think this is a process most of us will go through every fewe years…there must be an easer way?
To me, the easier way is called Apple. 🙂