Technology, Saving Time and Money?
I fired up the office computer this morning and for a second or third time heard a soft grinding from the tower. Hard drive crash a'coming.
So, I looked into replacing the hard drive. With the cost of the drive, install and cloning we are approaching $300 bucks. The tower is about four and a half years old. Unsophisticated risk/benefit analysis seems to indicate that it's time to get a new tower.
Off to Dell.com. Click Home/Home Office. There was a one day special prominently displayed. $399 for 1 Gig dual core RAM, 160 Gig hard drive 48x CD/DVR-RW, with keyboard, mouse and 19" flat screen. Upgrading Vista to Premium and adding a year of warranty will be costing me $550.
This is assuming that the Office 2000 Small Business CD from my dying machine will install on the new one. One guy at Dell says the license will self destruct with the machine, the other says it will install. It did install from my dead laptop earlier this year to the new one with Vista. Cross your collective fingers.
So far today, technology has cost me more than $500 and about five hours. Should never have thrown out my manual Smith Corona all those years ago.
4 comments:
Never had you figured as a Luddite.
Check the thrift shops in your area. I bet you can still find a manual typewriter there somewhere. Learn to re-ink your own ribbons, and you'll be in business.
Re-inking ribbons? Geez, my memory of manual typewriters doesn't even go back that far and near as I can figure, I'm a generation older than you guys! What era was that from anyway?
And -on another tangent here - is Vista really a good way to go or not? I just got this computer in February but opted to go with Windows XP instead of Vista. Had problems with IE 7 so dropped it back to IE 6 which works ok for me. Compatibility is a strange thing with computer stuff though isn't it? Ticks me off that apparently these manufacturers think everyone has a couple hundred just laying around, taking up space, to use to upgrade all the various software programs that suddenly won't work or only partially, with a new system. Oughta be a law there, ya know!
I was profligate with ribbons for my era, I only reversed them.
I got Vista on a new laptop early this year, it works as proved by me typing this post on it. It has it's quirks. It on occassion does not like to play well with others. AVG finally works with it. ZoneAlarm still won't come to the party. It won't run some old, late '90's programs.
My suggestion would be to stay with XP as long as it works with what you need a computer for. But, I had no real adverse results from Vista.
An interesting aside, if you buy a PC from the Dell business arm, you can still get XP. Not so with the "home/home office" arm.
Aside two, if you are on the home side of the company and you give them a "business" credit card number, the won't process it. I had to give them a "personal" card, though both are paid out of the same checking account. The sales guy, a nice young somewhat geeky guy said that I could start all over on the business side and use my business card to pay. I asked him if I did that, could I pay "over there" with my personal card? He chuckled? Audibly smirked? "Yes, but don't ask your next question," he said.
In the 80's I worked in the computer center of my college (big surprise, I know). We had banks and banks of Macs that everyone wanted to use (this was in the old days when only the very very rich could afford their own Macs, when a laser printer was a bargain for $5000) and there was always a waiting list. If I needed to write a paper, I wandered over to the IBM PCs running Ashton-Tate MultiMate -- no waiting. Ever.
Anyway, we used to have to reink the dot matrix Apple Imagewriter printers about once every two weeks. Had a special rig to do it too. Looked like something out of the movie Brazil.
Post a Comment