Joan on the Road...of Life

My new computer arrived Friday, late afternoon. I'm sitting outside totally immersed in a book when a FedEx guy comes up behind me and says, "M'am?" Then all other plans for the evening went away :)

We cleared off my work area, untangled the jumble of cords and started the set up process. Wow! Was it ever easy. Plugged everything in, turned it on, filled in a few questions and we were on the network and the internet.

Here's the new setup complete with coffee!

Low down on the left you see the computer tucked between the wall and my desk. My external backup drive sits on top. It's a Dell Vostro slim line with 4 GB of ram, Intel Dual Core processor 2.4 Ghz. It is faaast! Remember I said my old laptop took 15 minutes to startup. This one is about a minute. What will I do with all the time?

And it came with Windows XP! So no huge learning curve, just move everything over.

Notice the big monitor? It's a 19" Dell Ultrasharp with 4 USB connections, so it serves as a hub. The black bar on the bottom of the monitor is a speaker bar! It sounds pretty darn good :) My old wireless keyboard and Logitech Trackball complete the setup.

Saturday we spent most of the day loading programs and data but it all went very easily. Even things like moving Internet Explorer Favorites list and all my Outlook Express folders worked like a charm. (Many thanks to my Jim for doing all that!) Today there are just a few programs and files to retrieve from the old laptop and then load pictures and music files.

Jim did a lot of research and reading to find a good setup for me and I really appreciate all that. Actually, there is nothing better that he likes to do than shop and buy, especially electronics. We got our "economic stimulus" check last week and as you can see it's already been spent. The whole new computer package was about $1100 with no sales tax and no shipping charge. Yeah! So I'm set for another 5 years :)