But 5 years is a long time and beyond its expected lifespan. Dude was getting worried it would die in the middle of a huge deadline. We decided to get a new laptop. Now, I trust Dude with these decisions and he\u2019s an ASUS fanboy, so I now have a shiny new ASUS.<\/p>\n
- \n
- Intel Core i5-2430M CPU @ 2.4GHz<\/li>\n
- 6.00G RAM<\/li>\n
- 64-bit<\/li>\n
- Win7 Professional<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
We\u2019ve had it since April, actually. Dude\u2019s been using it. I customize a computer to beyond an inch of its life and I really didn\u2019t relish the fact that I would have:<\/p>\n
- \n
- a completely new operating system<\/li>\n
- incompatibility of my preferred work tools<\/li>\n
- unfamiliar new work tools<\/li>\n
- moving data<\/li>\n
- customizing those new work tools<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
I also had a Western Digital external hard drive we bought in 2004-2005 that held all my archives. Since it was<\/em> the backup, I hadn\u2019t felt the need to have<\/em> backup on it. Oh woe was me. Little did I know that it was on its last legs and this move killed it. I may or may not have unplugged it from the computer before it was supposed to have been.<\/p>\n
Dude spent three days with a very kind Samaritan retrieving the data. There are other issues with the data now, but it\u2019s there. I have it. This guy is a peach for helping us and here is his information: James Litten<\/a>.1<\/a><\/sup> Watch the video<\/span> [dead link]. Seriously, people, give this guy business. He deserves it. I cannot stress this enough.<\/p>\n
So I\u2019m almost totally moved in. I cannot stand the fact that this OS\u2019s changes seem to encompass how it looks. As far as I can see, the only reason it exists is to make the roundy corners on dialog boxes transparent and wavy. Whatever else it does, I don\u2019t know. Please feel free to enlighten me below.<\/p>\n
The first thing I do when I move into a computer is change the theme to resemble, as closely as possible, Win95. The new start menu was completely unintelligible and\/or takes more clicks than it needs to. I started pinning things to my task bar immediately. But I still couldn\u2019t deal with the interface. So I found this tool: Classic Shell XP<\/a> (because XP was good about letting you have the 95 look). I still have the little wavy in the toolbar, but okay.<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/07\/20120713_desktop.jpg\")
That really is Win 3.x green rivets background.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n HOWEVER, my hatred for moving was borne out by the fact that while Office 2000 and Acrobat 7.0 Standard will<\/em> run on Win7, their functionality is rendered nearly useless for my purposes. Every time I closed Word 2000, it said it had crashed. Acrobat 7.0 can\u2019t be installed as a printer driver at all. This is purposeful on Adobe\u2019s part and I\u2019m coming to despise Adobe almost as much as I despise Apple.<\/p>\n
Then I found XP Mode\/XP Virtual Machine, which \u2026 crashed when I tried to install Acrobat 7.0 as the printer driver. I was despondent, thinking I\u2019d have to buy an upgrade. Why? Why is this necessary, Adobe? What functionality have you added that I actually need? None.<\/p>\n
I went on eBay, where I always get my software a couple of versions back and for cheep<\/em>! I found this listing<\/span>. Then I Googled what this is selling for everywhere, so clearly this listing was the jackpot<\/em>! Now, I\u2019ve been on eBay since dirt and have had about two bad buying experiences and it\u2019s because I know how to read the listings. What\u2019s wrong with that one? Rant in the comments below. (Now I see there are new listings.)<\/p>\n
So I\u2019m back to the sinking feeling I\u2019d have to buy Acrobat X. I had some difficult (for me\u2014shut up, this is traumatic!) decisions to make.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, I needed two antispyware and antimalware utilities, which CNET conveniently had. Both gave me viruses and\/or adware and\/or spyware. CNET, you are worse than useless. You are perpetuating computer disease and whatever trust you have built up over the years is gone. I want everyone to know you are destroying computer health with these bullshit downloads.<\/p>\n
Dude had a copy of Office 2010 he got from his work for a minimal charge, so I sucked it up and installed it after I read that it had a function to \u201csave as PDF.\u201d Another reason was because I had to do a quote PDQ and needed a PDF that wasn\u2019t created with some cheap-ass generic PDF maker. Getting my normal.dot into this fucker was a nightmare. I still don\u2019t know where the normal.dotm is stored, but I was FINALLY able to find where to point it to my preferred folder for templates.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s another thing. I\u2019m very specific about where I want what stored. I have C: for the OS and program files. I have D: solely for data. Something I consider data is my Word and Excel templates. So I put those in D: and boy did Word 2010 make me work to find the way to set that. It imported all my macros and styles, but it still didn\u2019t import my toolbars from normal.dot, but that\u2019s because Microsoft has totally borked the purpose of toolbars. Don\u2019t these people actually use the products they design? So now I\u2019m faced with the task of rebuilding my toolbars and preferences and getting used to it. Cry for me, Argentina.<\/p>\n
Well, I found out that Word 2010 really DOES \u201csave as\u201d PDF. Hallelujah!<\/em> I may have done a victory jig. (Pix or it didn\u2019t happen.) Until \u2026 I tried to print to a different page size. It seems that 8.5×11 is the default with no way to edit the page size to 6×9, for example. And I still don\u2019t know if those PDFs are acceptable for Lightning Source. I also don\u2019t know what effect using Word 2010 will have on the Smashwords documents I create. I guess I\u2019ll find out next week when I upload the next installment of Dunham<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n
My next problem was Flash. Isn\u2019t it always. The Shockwave Flash plugin for Firefox was crashing like crazy. I had to disable the damned thing and trust me, after having been denied access to Flash on my iPad, I was not willing to do so on my PC. Apparently this is a common problem, as evidenced by posts and no solutions. How the fuck do you not have a solution after two years?<\/p>\n
Really, it seems many of my problems are caused by the change to a 64-bit system from a 32-bit system.<\/p>\n
This has been going on since last Tuesday. What used to take me around 8 hours has taken me almost a week of dedicated effort. (No, I don\u2019t use a moving wizard because I like to customize as I go.)<\/p>\n
What I still have to do is:<\/p>\n
- \n
- transfer the data from my dead hard drive (currently on Dude\u2019s computer)<\/li>\n
- customize Word and Excel 2010, and \u2026<\/li>\n
- wait for and install Adobe Acrobat X that I ended up buying.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
UPDATE 7:14PM CDT<\/strong>: It appears that Firefox and Google want to protect me from myself, but because I hadn\u2019t updated Firefox in forever<\/em>, I was unaware of this bullshit, and now that I\u2019m running the latest version of Firefox, I\u2019ve got brand new annoyances to deal with.<\/p>\n
\n______________________________<\/p>\n
1<\/a>.<\/span> EMAIL: James@Litten.com<\/a>, PHONE: (848) 207-4291<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have\/had a Dell laptop I\u2019ve had for 5 years. That thing has been a workhorse, but it had been having a couple of problems I either found a workaround for or put up with. It was on and cooking 12-18 hours a day every day. It had been reformatted twice, hauled around on vacation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87,566],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5089","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-money","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5089"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5089"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5089\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18523,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5089\/revisions\/18523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}