Replaced my laptop!

I bought a Sony Vaio on sale at Fry's last night, and blew the savings on the 3-year warranty.  I'm thrifty and don't usually buy warranties, but laptops are an exception.  If you ever worked inside a laptop, you know why laptops break more often than many other electronic devices. The delicate miniature components are crowded, with little room for cooling air flow, and they get carried around.

My old Compaq laptop was positively elderly, and I had a Dell Mini 10 network that was fairly old, too.  They were both quite good, really, and both are reimaged now and ready for a new purpose in life.  Steven said he wants the old Compaq for school. 

I haven't decided whether I can part with the Mini 10.  That itsy-bitsy netbook was really feature-laden and so small it could be dropped in one of my bigger purses.  It's S L O W, but it would do almost anything I needed as long as I wasn't in a hurry.  I've traveled with it often.  I was careful with it, and it's in nearly perfect shape.  I just reimaged it, in fact, it's sitting here installing a zillion updates right now onto its new, clean operating system.

When a computer gets to be a couple years old, it will almost always benefit from being re-imaged, that is, you save items you'll need later, reformat the hard disk, reinstall all the software and replace your files.  I don't recommend this painstaking process to amateurs, but it can breathe new life and even years into an old computer.  I've gotten that done for the old Compaq laptop and the Dell Mini.

So, here's a photo of my new Sony.  They all look alike, don't they?  Still, I am excited because this baby has really good stuff under the hood that will help me get more work done.  I am enjoying the speed! 

I often hear the prejudice that older people can't cope with computers, but I appreciate them so much, after years of dealing with typewriters, carbon paper, index cards, library research, letter writing, old-fashioned film developing and all that outdated stuff.  

Now that my office move and vacation are over, I plan to get back to all old tricks, especially the pile of knitting ideas infesting my brain.  You can't get rid of these things unless you knit them, and then you have to get them just right and maybe teach someone else how to do it!