the big switcheroo

This is the second entry I am writing on my laptop instead of my old crotchety desktop computer. Yes, I know I’ve had the laptop for several months and yet I haven’t gotten into the habit of using it.

Mostly this is a logistical situation. The desktop computer is on my nice computer desk in the living room. It faces the TV so I can watch a movie or TV show and review it at the same time. The computer itself may be on the crappy side but I have a very good 17″ monitor (I bought one specifically recommended for graphic designers, back in the day), a scanner, and two printers, one color inkjet and one laser. Everything you could want … five or six years ago when a P200 running Win 95 was a good machine.
But I really ought to wean myself off the desktop. The email software is getting old and cranky but I don’t think I can upgrade it. I’m not sure I can upgrade anything on there, really. I’m running out of hard drive space, since it has a 4GB hard drive. I have all the apps I need on my laptop except for the email software, and it would be a simple matter to install that.
The plan is that I will semi-retire the old machine. Once I back up all the important files on CD, we will upgrade it to Win 98 (stop laughing) and then hopefully we can get it to network with the other computers in the house. That way, we’ll have the printers networked. Also, the scanner is old and there aren’t any drivers for it past Win 98, and I dislike the idea of buying a new scanner when that one is perfectly fine. So the old machine will be used mainly for scanning/photo manipulation work, and if everything is networked then it’ll be easy enough to move things from one machine to another.
Right now it’s damn difficult. The old computer doesn’t have any USB ports, the new computer doesn’t have a floppy drive. If I want to move something I essentially have to use FTP and one of my Web hosting accounts. This is why I wrote last night’s entry on the laptop—I have to upload the photos from my digital camera to the laptop and it is too much trouble to move them to the desktop. Good.
I also moved a small table in front of the desktop, facing the TV, and put the laptop on it. I added my own mouse and small keyboard because I really dislike the laptop keyboard. It’s up too high on the laptop and my wrists are forced into an unnatural position. I can deal with the touchpad on the laptop if I have to, but a mouse is much easier when I’m working with photos and other graphic stuff.
I’m still getting used to the tiny new keyboard that I bought to go with the laptop, because the Delete key is in an odd place and there’s no separate numbers section and all that. In an ideal world, I would like all the keyboards, mice, and operating systems that I use at work and at home to be identical. But right now I’m happy enough that I got a new laptop and a new work computer at about the same time and they run the same operating system (XP), and that I don’t have to fight with the laptop keyboard if I don’t want to.
I’m also thinking I might bring the laptop with me at Christmas, so I can work on my own computer and not have to worry about caching incriminating pages on my parents’ machine (although I will either have to use their dial-up or get someone to drive me to PJ’s) … and perhaps I will update here more regularly too. Would be nice, wouldn’t it?
So bear with an increase in typos as I learn the idiosyncracies of the new keyboard, where the Home key is a little too close to the Backspace key and the Delete key is lurking in the bottom corner. In the long run, I am sure the switch will provide you with a richer content experience (hee).