Tag: computers

Computer Update

I’m having a bit of a delay on my my next section of my Riverwalk post.

My computer is apparently older than I remembered. I could’ve sworn I bought more computers than this since Thomas’s and my breakup, but I guess this dates from 2012.

Anyway, the poor thing is feeling its age and it was hard to do anything with the computer, so Alex sat down with it on Wednesday and added a solid-state drive and upgraded the fans. He tried to add more RAM and a new graphics card, but my computer wasn’t having that.

As a side effect of all of this messing around, my computer decided for a day or so that it didn’t like my old hard drive. I finally got the hard drive back, but neither Word or Excel will work any longer. I also have lost all of the passwords saved in my browser.

What this amounts to is that I have found that I could open my posts in the version of OpenOffice that I’ve had since 2015 and was finally able to rescue my dictated blog posts and, well, it’s like trying to read old shorthand. When I first started cleaning up the post, I remembered most of what I said. But now, I’m down to remembering the walk and just kind of using keywords from the dictated post.

So now I know that I have to get my dictation translated in less than a week. Also, I think I need to enunciate more clearly to avoid some stuff like “I don’t know why the bear that very thing has some items on nowhere else.” I don’t know what I was trying to say there.

I guess it’s time to get back to interpreting my dictation.

I also have been going through lists of books and now have over 700 books that I have read or want to read on my Goodreads page. So I’m not likely to run out of Amazon Links (Gratuitous or Germane) for quite a while.

So, for today’s Gratuitous Amazon Link, I have We Ride Upon Sticks, by Quan Barry, a riff on the Salem Witch Trials set in Danvers, Massachusetts in 1989. Just so good. After selling their souls to Emilio Estevez, the girls’ field hockey team from Danvers High School goes from losers to the top. Does Emilio Estevez have dark powers? Or is something else going on?

Hardware . . . Inventory?

Since I’m doing all of this writing on my computers, my hardware has been on my mind a lot lately. Additionally, every time I pause a YouTube video, it takes quite a while to get up to full steam again.

So. I got this computer in I think it was 2013? 2015? It’s hella old and running really slowly. I hesitate to replace it based just on that (I only replaced my first Android phone in 2019. I literally couldn’t install software on it anymore and now I use it to listen to podcasts and Chinesepod lessons in my car).

I had to have a new hard drive installed in this computer a few years ago because the hard drive just crapped out on me. I have a data drive, so I didn’t lose any data (hooray for data drives!), but the c:\ drive wouldn’t work at all anymore.

More pressing, in a odd way, is that I’d like to start using my most recent laptop (which, by “most recent” I mean I got it when Alex was a toddler). I booted it up recently and discovered that the BIOS can’t find the hard drive at all. I don’t know if my computer repair place can install a new one, but I just need to be able to write on it. If I could watch YouTube videos on it, that’d be nice, too, but not necessary. I’d like to take the laptop with me when traveling. I’m not planning on doing any traveling this month, so I don’t need to get it fixed for Camp NaNoWriMo. I do need to remember to call the computer people about it anyhow. Maybe I should get a new battery, too.

My phone is in good shape. I also have a tablet from 2012 that I literally can only run Kindle on anymore. Which means that I have a nine-year-old e-reader. I can work with that.

Gratuitous Amazon Link: In 2015, a friend gave me a copy of Mark of the Dragonfly by Jaleigh Johnson, a steampunky science fiction novel set on a planet called Solace. I don’t have a read date for that one yet, so instead I’m linking to its sequel The Secrets of Solace. It’s odd for a sequel, because the characters from the first book aren’t even referenced in this one. But I really enjoyed the book and its look into the World of Solace. I just realized that I’ve never read the third book in the series, The Quest to the Uncharted Lands. I’ve added it to my Want to Read shelf on Goodreads.