My Life – Working Notes: July 8 2013

Windows 8I’m pretty handy with a computer, but this weekend was a new adventure.  My old desktop — “old” being four years old, which is ancient in computer terms — anyway, the desktop recently blew a gasket:  One of the 500Gb hard drives curled up its toes and died.

That left 500Gb of storage left, of which I was already using 465Gb.  If you know anything about computers at all, you can probably guess what that did to the functioning of the computer.

It crawled to a s…l…o…w.

Waiting for 30 seconds for a simple click on a file to do anything quickly drove me to the point of a temper tantrum.  I don’t have that sort of time to waste.

Office 365I couldn’t justify buying a whole new computer, as Mark’s was even older than mine, running Windows XP.   My desktop had the much maligned Vista 64 bit, while my laptop, which operates as an extension of my right arm most days, had Windows 7.  It was a hodge podge of systems and software and our home wifi network didn’t like Mark’s computer at all.

The kicker that made us do something about it was that we wanted to buy Office 365, the new on-line subscription to Microsoft Office, but 365 is only compatible with Vista or higher operating systems.

So, Mark got a brand spanking new computer and a monitor that keeps reminding me of the old joke about the male preoccupation with size — it’s huge.

There wasn’t anything essentially wrong with mine except for storage capacity.   A replacement hard drive would fix the issues, so I found a Seagate 4Tb internal hard drive at a stupendously great price.  I also shelled out for two licenses for Windows 8 upgrades.

I’ve never physically screwed around with the guts of my computer before.  I’ve cracked the case open to remove dust bunnies, but never installed/ripped out parts.  It was initially frustrating until I had figured out how the drive cage was unmounted, then I had the drive installed and running within thirty minutes.

I upgraded both my desktop and my laptop to Windows 8, to match Mark’s computer.  Ooooh, shiny new software!  It’s fun, but it takes a bit to get used to navigating around.

Then everyone in the house got a copy of Office 365.  Now that has some major benefits, compared to stand alone versions of Office.  Once I get more familiar with the ins and outs, I may write a post on how a writer can maximize its functions for their work.

Novel Stuff

Now that I’ve got a fully functioning computer array, I can get back to work on books instead of bytes.  I’m staring down the track at a long marathon of book production and writing in order to meet all the end-of-year deadlines looming.

If you take note of such things, you may have noticed that the progress bar for Romani Armada, in the sidebar, has been creeping along.

I’m starting to think that 400 pages won’t do it….

Don’t forget to check the upcoming releases page for release dates, if you need them.

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2 thoughts on “My Life – Working Notes: July 8 2013”

  1. I have a husband who built my computer from the ground up, so I don’t have those types of problems. So how is the Windows 8? I have heard it’s not all that great unless you want to be able to get apps. But then again to have all computers on the same system is good too. We here are all on 7 so we can converse computer to computer and the WiFi printer loves us all. Glad it all works out for you. And YES I do know about guys and their toys bigger is definitely the theme they go for.

    1. I’m still getting used to W8, Robyn. It’s…different.

      Underneath the fancy apps pages, though, it’s very similar to the previous generations. You just have to set up your app shortcuts so you can get to them quickly.

      t.

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