An interruption!

You may have noticed a small change in my frequency of posting. I have had an interruption to my workflow! I decided that I’d treat myself to a new laptop. My existing tower pc is getting on a bit, and has decided to start doing wonderful things, such as insisting I update from Windows 10 to 11, try as I might I can’t get rid of the prompt without agreeing. It then spends the best part of an hour up-dating, deciding that it can’t run it, then another hour putting everything back again. Then it will be happy for another couple of weeks, and I repeat. It gets a bit boring!

My, until now rather good speakers, seem to have lost the left hand channel. I wondered if it was a sound card issue, I’ve now confirmed not, so two speakers, three cables and a rather large transformer can now go to recycling.

My broadband supplier put the cost up, so I’ve now changed. In the end I saved nothing, but did gain faster speed and a new modem.

My iPad has long got to the point where it won’t up-date, this means that it won’t display several websites correctly any more. Ebay and Amazon are a no go area on it. I often just wish to sit on the sofa and surf rather than at the desk, and that is becoming more of a challenge. So, all of the above, and a wish to de-clutter a bit, prompted me to buy a new laptop.

I went online and made my choice. I ordered it on a Thursday, and it was delivered Saturday at no extra cost. Then began the fun…

It appears that it is now not possible to use a new laptop, with windows, without a Microsoft account. I find this annoying, but no great issue. I sat down and answered its many, many, many questions, denying it access to anything I could. It came pre-installed with a 3 month trial of McAfee, I uninstalled this, I have a three machine subscription with Norton! I unpinned a load of junk I’ll never use from the task bar, installed my copy of Microsoft Office. Yes, I purchased it back in the days when one could. Then I installed my copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements 9. Official disk, proper key etc. It loaded fine, popped a shortcut on the desktop fine. Then the laptop decided it must re-start. It died. I restarted several times, went to the advanced settings, nothing there of use, as I had no recovery disk or code. Luckily, Curry’s the retailer I purchased the machine from have a local branch, so I took it back, explained the issue, and they gave me a new machine.

Long story short (too late!) “repeat”. This time I made sure to create a restore point as my first action. I got a bit quicker at answering Microsoft’s questions, and loaded my software. This time I couldn’t “activate” my Microsoft Office as “I have reached my limit of installations” Wonderful! I installed adobe again, the laptop died -again. This time however I had created a restore point, so I went to the advanced settings, whereupon I was told no restore point had been made, despite the fact I made a point of creating one and naming it! Wonderful! I made yet another journey to the shop……. they gave me another machine. I can’t fault their service, in fact it’s been brilliant.

Repeat. Questions. Load. This time however I did not load Office – no point. I didn’t load Adobe either. Why Adobe works perfectly well on my tower running Windows 10 and not on the laptops Windows 11 I have no idea, and I don’t feel inclined to find out either. Neither do I feel inclined to sign up for monthly debits to use both either – putting it politely “they can shove it!”.

I’ve downloaded and installed (with breath held) Libre Office. It’s free, installed with no problems, in minutes I’d made test files etc, banged out a “power-point” presentation, connected it to my TV, and all is well. “Writer” the equivalent of Word is more than familiar, as far as I can see it’s identical – just without the cost. In fact I’d go further, the native font Liberation Serif I prefer. This post has been written on it, then just cut and pasted into WordPress, this will become my new flow, rather than sat at a desk.

I’ve also downloaded GIMP 2, again it looks very familiar although I need time to familiarize myself with the locations of certain things I use, that’s just a matter of time. After a couple weeks of messing about trying to get a computer to work – I’m finally there (I think/hope), one would think my hobby was computing rather than photography!

So my spare time has been spent faffing about rather than enjoying myself with analogue adventures. However, yesterday I developed another roll, so normal service will soon be resumed!!

Thanks for reading – if indeed you still are!