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gervase_fenIt's been a while, with life revolving around switchback shifts (2 to midnight, day off, 4.45 to 2), lack of money and planning for Mrs Fen's birthday next week (craft gin, Alasdair Beckett-King's Murder in the Museum and tickets to see the John Wilson Orchestra in November.) *
A recent slight payrise and a break in loan repayments have led me to spend £71.20 on a new PC Desktop Tower. This is a Dell OptiPlex 7010, with DVD, Windows 10 Professional, and anti virus software pre-installed. The old one dated back to 2010, its DVD player had long since died, and the boot times were growing longer and longer. The new (renewed and refurbished) one is from 2015, lighter and a lot slimmer than the Hewlett-Packard that now lies dormant in a cardboard box next to the fridge.
I'm delighted with it. I backed up as much as I could to portable hard drives before pulling the plug, and my only regret is not doing this sooner - specifically, before Microsoft retired Office 2010. I had been able to re-install Office 2010 when the hard drive died on the HP six years ago by digging out the invoice and product key from the depths of my G-Mail account. Alas, no chance to do this at all now. The Dell has OpenOffice pre-installed, but I'm so accustomed to the look and feel of Microsoft's barely adequate Word and Excel I don't think I'll get used to a probably better suite of software soon.
FireFox remembered most of the LiveMarks, about a third of them for culture or crime fiction blogs and journals that are no longer active. I think the RSS feeds are why I stay loyal to FireFox - I'm sure Chome and Edge have them but don't want to bother learning how to implement them. I'm having a great time/sink organising them into RSS folders - categories so far being ARCHIVE TV, SF, CRIME, COMICS, NEWS, WRITERS, FILM & TV NEWS, BLOGS and the outlier SUPER DELUXE EDITION. Along the way I've refreshed a few passwords, and started to download apps from the Window Store (on the previous PC I was accustomed to just visiting the websites for Spotify, Facebook and Twitter.)
The new Tower is small and light enough that it fits on the crossbar underneath the computer desk horizontally - a much better set up for using the DVD drive - and I really have no excuse now fo not doing a better job than I did with the last one of dusting the back of it.
*A chance to see Jamie Parker singing live in public for the first time since The History Boys at the National Theatre in 2004!
A recent slight payrise and a break in loan repayments have led me to spend £71.20 on a new PC Desktop Tower. This is a Dell OptiPlex 7010, with DVD, Windows 10 Professional, and anti virus software pre-installed. The old one dated back to 2010, its DVD player had long since died, and the boot times were growing longer and longer. The new (renewed and refurbished) one is from 2015, lighter and a lot slimmer than the Hewlett-Packard that now lies dormant in a cardboard box next to the fridge.
I'm delighted with it. I backed up as much as I could to portable hard drives before pulling the plug, and my only regret is not doing this sooner - specifically, before Microsoft retired Office 2010. I had been able to re-install Office 2010 when the hard drive died on the HP six years ago by digging out the invoice and product key from the depths of my G-Mail account. Alas, no chance to do this at all now. The Dell has OpenOffice pre-installed, but I'm so accustomed to the look and feel of Microsoft's barely adequate Word and Excel I don't think I'll get used to a probably better suite of software soon.
FireFox remembered most of the LiveMarks, about a third of them for culture or crime fiction blogs and journals that are no longer active. I think the RSS feeds are why I stay loyal to FireFox - I'm sure Chome and Edge have them but don't want to bother learning how to implement them. I'm having a great time/sink organising them into RSS folders - categories so far being ARCHIVE TV, SF, CRIME, COMICS, NEWS, WRITERS, FILM & TV NEWS, BLOGS and the outlier SUPER DELUXE EDITION. Along the way I've refreshed a few passwords, and started to download apps from the Window Store (on the previous PC I was accustomed to just visiting the websites for Spotify, Facebook and Twitter.)
The new Tower is small and light enough that it fits on the crossbar underneath the computer desk horizontally - a much better set up for using the DVD drive - and I really have no excuse now fo not doing a better job than I did with the last one of dusting the back of it.
*A chance to see Jamie Parker singing live in public for the first time since The History Boys at the National Theatre in 2004!
