Computery things

[sunnyskywalker]

I finally got a new laptop, since given how long it takes to get electronics these days I thought I'd better make sure I got a new one before the old one finally dies. The past six years apparently erased my memory of how long it takes to configure everything. There has been a lot of NO, MICROSOFT, STOP THAT and swearing. And not a lot of anything else I wanted to be doing. It's taking even longer because Windows 11 is new to me. (Why are so many "updates" apparently nothing more than moving controls around? Did you like that button in the bottom left? Cool, now it's in the middle! Which accomplishes nothing useful but makes us look productive!) I think I'm getting there, so...better luck tomorrow?

At work, the hard drives of the shared workstation computers are critically full. IT asked us all to clear our downloads folders and browser caches. Between us all, that freed up maybe 300 MB. Yet many of the user accounts are showing huge numbers of files and many gigabytes of space used--even though they don't appear anywhere! Our working theory is that we've spawned an AI which is hiding itself in the shared computers. We can only hope it is a friendly AI.

Comments

[mary_j_59]

Oh, yikes! I hate updating computers. It's supposed to be easier with Macs (I love my ancient iMac), but it is simply never easy.

[sunnyskywalker]

Oh, it's been pretty straightforward! It's just a giant pain in the neck. Do I have Adobe Reader? Nope, got to download and install that. Office? Technically yes but really no, just the free trial versions which they'll charge me for eventually, so better just buy the real versions now and download and install them. Scrivener and Aeon Timeline? Of course not, must download and install those too, and go through some extra steps because my license was for an older version of Scrivener...

And it really annoys me that they keep moving buttons around so you know it's a new! shiny! updated! version, when all it actually accomplishes is making you relearn your mousing habits. I mean, did they really do a massive usability test to prove some amazing benefit from moving the Windows button from the left side of the task bar to the middle? Even if they did, how amazing could that benefit be? Not amazing enough, I'm certain.