Quote Originally Posted by ny biker View Post
So, not just a computer odyssey but a general machine-related odyssey for you, smilingcat. It does seem like everything breaks down at once. For me lately it's been phone, work pc, refrigerator, toaster oven, regular oven. Plus my car is due for service and has a dent in the front that I need to fix one of these days. So far I have only dealt with the phone and the toaster oven, though technically I'm not done with the phone yet -- I can't get it read the music files on the sd card and I still have to reset the old one and turn it in so I can get a credit for it. But once I finish dealing with that, I'm sure something else will break or wear out. It's always something!
Just over a month later -- I still haven't dealt with the refrigerator or the oven, and still haven't been able to get my new phone to read the music files on the SD card. But I was forced into taking the car in for service this week. It's a long story so I'll just skip to the end and say that the guy at the local Toyota dealership who has been taking care of my car for years has once again done a great job of fixing things quickly and for a reasonable price.

More relevant to this thread, I have finally taken the plunge and gotten a new pc for work. The old one has just gotten so slow, I didn't want to put it off any longer. I prefer to buy from the local Micro-Center, and after looking through the laptops and desktops on their website, including the customer reviews, I decided to get a relatively inexpensive HP laptop with Windows 10. I will still use the larger monitor and more comfortable mouse that I already have. The guy at the store tried to upsell me because "the processor is not the latest model." This annoyed me; of course he doesn't know the backstory of how annoyed I am that I have to provide my own pc for work or how much I detest setting up new tech devices or how generally peevish I am right now due to the sedentary lifestyle that has been forced on me by the ankle injury, but still, when someone has obviously already chosen the exact model that they want before walking into the store, there are better ways of suggesting that they consider another product. Then he tried to sell me on anti virus software. Then he tried to help me choose an external hard drive even though I'd already done the research and made that decision, too. Eventually he figured out that I was not going to be a big spender, handed me the paperwork to take to the cashier and ran back to the pc department.

So now I am about ready to start the process of setting things up and transferring files from the old laptop to the new one. I do hope it goes smoothly. Once it's all up and running, I want to start using it after hours for some tutorials to learn a new programming language, which of course is another flavor of computer odyssey...