No post tonight … well, except this post. Spent the afternoon and evening getting a new laptop set up. The old one had gotten to the point where it did very little without its fan running at full blast, and it took forever to turn on whenever the screen was brought back from sleep. Still have a bit further to go with the new one, but it’s working well.
I’m not so picky about my settings that I need to transfer them over, but doing it manually does take a bit of time. The fact is, I’m fairly OS-agnostic at this point. The cloud is my computer, and a laptop is just a means to access that data and processing power. Still, one wants that laptop to have a good screen, and a fast hard drive, and a powerful CPU, albeit not so powerful that it sets the fan running.
This new one seems pretty solid. The laptop is so deep, there is a sense of cavernousness to the keyboard, like the space below the keys is evident, not just the depth of them, but the spaciousness further below. That’s unlike my more recent laptops, where I was essentially tapping on the surface of something just above the table top, with a negligible air gap. Typing on those super thin laptops wasn’t particularly different from doing so on an iPad.
There’s much to adjust to with the new laptop, but the majority of the software has now been installed. There are a few lingering issues, like an account calendar that won’t sync and a social network denying access due to some missing backup codes, but it’ll get sorted soon enough.
Getting a new laptop is sort of like moving into a rental apartment. You know you’ll only be here for about five years (I’m pretty rough on laptops, and they often last little more than three), but while you’re here, you want to make it your own. Swap out the wallpaper, add your fingerprint to the lock, change the default tools for more specialized ones.
And one by one, turn off those annoying alert sounds. Every time you mute one, another makes itself known. Months will pass at some point, and only then will you look back and realize, “Oh, it’s been a while since an alert went off. I must have gotten them all.”