New Laptop
On Saturday, my new laptop, a mid-grade Dell Inspiron 15 arrived. Today, I turned it on for the first time.
You might reasonably ask why purchasing a brand new laptop was a top priority after getting laid off. The sad truth is that since my last desktop died five years ago, I haven't needed to buy one. Once I brought my work laptop home, that covered the vast majority of my technology needs. It got a little more challenging late in 2022 while I was on sabbatical when we finally started locking down many social media & email sites, but I was able to make it work well enough.
However, I'm going to have ship back my work laptop pretty much as soon as the shipping materials arrive. It was clear that I was going to need a better computer than M's iPad or her now 17-year-old laptop, so I priced out a mid-grade laptop. It arrived two days later. In an act of supreme will, from the time it arrived on Saturday until this morning I did nothing more than take it out of the box and plug it in to charge. This morning I did some basic start up and configuration, just enough to make it usable.
The computers of my childhood were beloved devices, and I still remember a great deal of information about them. While I heartily approve of the many standardizations and improvements that have come to the world of computers in the last 35 years, in my eyes those changes definitely has made computers more of a disposable everyday appliance than they once were to me.
You might reasonably ask why purchasing a brand new laptop was a top priority after getting laid off. The sad truth is that since my last desktop died five years ago, I haven't needed to buy one. Once I brought my work laptop home, that covered the vast majority of my technology needs. It got a little more challenging late in 2022 while I was on sabbatical when we finally started locking down many social media & email sites, but I was able to make it work well enough.
However, I'm going to have ship back my work laptop pretty much as soon as the shipping materials arrive. It was clear that I was going to need a better computer than M's iPad or her now 17-year-old laptop, so I priced out a mid-grade laptop. It arrived two days later. In an act of supreme will, from the time it arrived on Saturday until this morning I did nothing more than take it out of the box and plug it in to charge. This morning I did some basic start up and configuration, just enough to make it usable.
The computers of my childhood were beloved devices, and I still remember a great deal of information about them. While I heartily approve of the many standardizations and improvements that have come to the world of computers in the last 35 years, in my eyes those changes definitely has made computers more of a disposable everyday appliance than they once were to me.