I’ve written several times before about setting up new computers and other digital devices. (See here and here.) I was at it again last month.
Before the pandemic, my then-three-year-old laptop had started having battery problems. These problems took two forms. First, the laptop only held a charge for a few hours, and sometimes with heavy wi-fi usage, it quit after only thirty minutes or so. I learned never to take it out of the house without schleping the power cord as well.
Second, and somewhat more disconcerting, the laptop chassis seemed to warp. The keyboard bulged over where the battery was located. I usually use a full-size keyboard, so this wasn’t a problem generally. But over time, it became harder and harder to press the keys and trackpad.
Of course, I’ve rarely taken the laptop out of the house since mid-March last year, and not at all since Labor Day. So I mostly ignored these problems. Even though I know someone whose house burned down due to a defective laptop.
Then, one morning in mid-February, when I had moved the laptop upstairs to avoid my 58-degree office in the middle of Kansas City’s cold spell, I got this ugly black screen message telling me that the computer didn’t think its battery could hold a charge any longer. I have no idea how the computer knew this about its innards—maybe it’s kind of like when you feel a pain in your gut that you know means something isn’t right.
Anyway, I decided I shouldn’t ignore the computer’s diagnostics, and I bought a new laptop. I’d been eyeing a new model of the HP Spectre x360, so I knew what I wanted. I’ve had two very nice 13-inch HP Spectres (including the dying one), and I wanted the new 13.5-inch model. It has received very favorable reviews, and I like the size and design of the small Spectres.
All that was left was to research configurations and prices. That I did, and I found I could customize the exact model I wanted on the HP website for a certain price, but the machine wouldn’t ship until mid-March. Or I could pay a little less on Best Buy for a better model and have it by the end of the week.
Best Buy got my business.
I followed the UPS tracking notices assiduously. On Thursday morning, I received an email saying the laptop would be here by the end of the day—a day ahead of schedule!
UPS has this feature “Follow My Delivery” which lets customers follow the delivery truck from stop to stop along its route. I had a meeting Thursday morning, but when that ended at 11:00 a.m., I looked at the UPS map. The truck was in my subdivision! Surely, I would be the next delivery.
But no. That truck meandered from that house in our subdivision to the south, to the east, to the west, to the north, and back into our subdivision, where it proceeded to stop at about ten houses before reaching mine at 3:00 p.m.
I won’t say I got nothing done in those four hours of watching the truck, but it wasn’t my most productive day.
Then I had to deal with the laptop set-up. As I’ve said in earlier posts, while I love getting a new computer, I hate the transition involved in setting it up.
Though I admit that each time, the set-up gets easier. This time, when I turned it on for the first time, it asked to be connected to my home network. Within ten minutes after I took it out of the box, I was connected. Which meant I had full access to the Internet, including all the passwords I’ve saved online, so I could manage that part of my life on the new computer immediately.
Then I spent two days loading programs—Microsoft 365, Scrivener, ProWriting Aid, my back-up program, and a few others. And transferring data and programs from my old computer to an external hard drive to the new computer. (Yes, I could have used the cloud, and OneDrive actually transferred a lot of data without my asking it to, but I wanted to be sure I had everything.)
Unfortunately, OneDrive seems to have taken over, and a lot of my files open there instead of on the hard drive. I want back-ups on OneDrive, but I want the most up-to-date versions on the laptop itself, so I can work on it if the network goes down or I’m somewhere without free and easy wi-fi access. And I want the external hard drive to have a back up as well.
After two weeks, I can report that I am mostly functional. There have been a few hiccups—like losing access to this website for a day. And the programs I’ve loaded on the new machine don’t have all my preferences set up the way I want yet. Nevertheless, though I am not yet up to full productivity, I can work fairly effectively on my new laptop.
And it’s so pretty.
How do you handle new technology?
Not well, I’m afraid!