3778 Kicking and screaming into the new era

Sunday, October 13, 2013

Homophobia: The fear that gay men will treat you the way you treat women.

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In the spring of 2007, I bought my first laptop, and went from a heavily modified (by Jay) Windows 98(?) on a desk PC to Vista on a Dell laptop.  Big jump!  The transition was a bit scary at first, but at least I didn't hate it.

Last July I bought a Toshiba "Satellite" laptop.  Woot had a great deal.  It has more than 10 times the everything than my old one, and it's running Windows 8.

Yesterday Hercules finally got around to helping me with it.  He hooked up the old hard drive as an external drive on the new machine, and copied all my photos, documents, and music from the old to the new.  We couldn't get the cookies or bookmarks, though, because Hercules wasn't sure they'd be compatible, or something, I don't know.

Today I played with the new.  I did convince it to use the house WiFi, I set the date and time, installed and synched Firefox and logged on to a few of my favorite sites, got their quick-access icons on the Firefox toolbar and the passwords stored, and that was about it.

I haven't figured out yet how to get to my photos or documents.  There's one of those silly app tiles for photos, and it automatically scrolls through and displays, on the tile itself, random photos from my photo folders, including the naked ones!, none of which happened to show up while Hercules was doing his thing, thank goodness.  I clicked on that tile, and all it does is throw up a full screen cycling mosaic of my photos (including the naked ones!).  It doesn't take me to the photo files, so that seems pretty useless.

So far I hate Windows 8.   It hides everything in the most obscure places, and shoves those stupid useless apps tiles at you.  With Vista, it was easy to find everything from the Start button.  I didn't even have to remember what the name of the program is that I use to edit documents, it was right there, and the notepad and calculator were right up front. 

Now?  Who knows?  I don't even know where to start looking, or how.  I bought a book.  We'll see how that goes.  So far it's been less than helpful on 9 of 10 things I looked up.

Once I'm fully up to speed on the new machine, the old will go to the country house, so I don't have to carry one back and forth.

(Yes, this is being written on the old laptop.  The new keyboard is just different enough that I keep hitting "Alt" instead of "Space", and "Alt" makes very strange things happen, and I am too tired to swear at it right now.)
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