Hi,
Nothing lasts forever. Items like computers and cell phones become less useful over time (or become problematic as they get junked up with unnecessary files). Minay and I are typically frugal and try to make everything we own last as long as possible, but eventually we do have to repair or replace some things.
It’s also true that very few things are built the way they used to be. This seems to be especially true of appliances. We moved into our new house fifteen years ago (April 2011), and since then we are on our third microwave, our second dishwasher, our second HVAC unit, and have replaced some faucets, a ceiling fan, a few toilets, and some light fixtures.
Oddly, we brought a couple of refrigerators from our old house that are still running fine. One was relatively new then (now it’s about 20 years old), and the other one was ancient (we inherited it from Minay’s parents, and it’s at least 40 years old now). They are both still running, fingers crossed, but we know that one or the other of them could suddenly die without warning. My bet is that the newer one will go first.
Unfortunately, I did have to replace my desktop computer recently. I have probably owned eight or ten of them in the last forty years or so (I started using computers in the 1980’s), and have probably also had six or seven laptops and two tablets during that time. I’m now down to one old desktop computer, one new one, and one laptop. The laptop is so I can work away from home when necessary, but that’s not very often these days. I do almost all my writing, image editing, and research on my desktop. The older one had been acting flaky (to use the technical term), so I decided it would be a good idea to replace it before it crashed.
I bought a new Windows 11 Dell (my old one has Windows 10) and started loading the software I would need from the original install discs (like MS Office and Adobe CS4 — the essentials), downloaded a few others (like On1 Photo Raw, Thunderbird, and Firefox — image editing, email, and browser), and got a few (like Scrivener and Affinity — for writing and publishing) from the Download folder on the older computer. Those were enough to get me started. Over the next few weeks, I added some of the other programs I will need as I get closer to publishing.
One of the things that happens over time is that computer hard drives (or solid-state drives in my case) get cluttered with all sorts of extras. I tend to save copies of whatever I’m working on at various stages of a project, along with a lot of research files, and those expand considerably as I work. The research files for a novel are sometimes dozens of times bigger than the novel itself. After I’ve published a book, I don’t need those files any longer, but the computer and backup drives get filled with them (taking up room like digital piles of old magazines and newspapers).
I also bought a brand new 8TB external backup drive, and set it to save a copy of everything I transferred to the new computer, except for system and program files. As I continue to work, it will keep a parallel copy of everything I create or edit. Transferring just the files I need is a process that will happen over several months, but it causes fewer headaches down the line and doesn’t pack my SSDs with stuff I don’t need anymore. The old computer is still hooked up, but not networked to the new one, so I can transfer files from it on USB flash drives whenever I need to.
So, it’s in with the new, but not out with the old quite yet.
The next post will be about (hopefully) fixing a long-standing (or collapsing) household problem.
See you then,
Michael
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