New Computer

Last Year was a big year with lots that I came into and accomplished......... except for getting a new computer.

So last week I completed my order with Dell - Monday night at 6pmEST. The Sales Guy - Alan - was okay, but he didn't remember an 8" floppy, a 5 1/4" floppy, and as to the 3.5" floppy - he said he had some recollections about it. Ouch - I've been around programing from my first computer experience at Hillcrest Jr High (1968)- where you had wires with plugs into a board and slap that board into a slot and power up the computer to have it do two or three transactions. Then it was the Main Frame at UCONN (1978) - with more than 700 IBM cards - color coded and bound together. I could get the computer to do a bunch of stuff, provided I fed them into the machine and waited and prayed I did not have a card punched incorrectly!

Fast forward - 2008 - I'm in my office, with 130 GB hard Drive, 1 GB of memory, 256m video display with two screens (that's only one of the three computers I use for the business) - and I feel like I'm back to 1978! Forty-eight seconds to open an application. I'll never get any work accomplished without a new solution. I work with about ten windows open at all times; of course business stuff that can be 3 or 4 ; spreadsheet or two; Word docs; database; email; Explorer with several pages open.

This week, Alan, the guy at Dell, assisted me with my purchase of a new computer. He said it would be 3-5 days for build and 3-5 days to ship. Short side 6 days - long side 10 ten days. So sometime next week - okay. If you ever ordered something from Dell, you know their customer communication system is amazing. By the time you hang up, the system begins to whirl, email after email - order received, build begun, boxed, ready for shipment, shipped, in transit, ...... then ding-dong the door bell rings - it's the FedEx guy bringing four boxes of equipment! Remember I said it was 6pm on Monday - and at 3:00pm on Thursday - it was here. Mind you the longest part of this little adventure for my new baby was the time it spent with the FedEx guy.

New twist - Dell does not include simple one-page glossy instruction on how to plug in the machine. Its on the machine - but how do you plug in the machine attach the #%$@#$% cables to it? No color coded map of anything. I get Alan on the phone - he gets the technical support - which sends me to the Dell site (mind you, you wouldn't have found it if you tried) the "Quick Reference Guide" - 76 pages long! Yet it is exactly what I needed.

Without too much trouble - I get my new machine up and running. Now I'm in the process of reloading various pieces of software. There is a new Wizard that didn't come with my previous Dell - a transfer wizard that enables (so they say) to transfer your data files via a serial cable. I'll let you know how that works.

By the way - now with an extra computer in the office - I needed an additional desk! Gotta love the Technology!