Monday, May 30, 2005

Feeling Of Two Minds

Before I start complaining, I'd like to say that I love my New Computer. But it's taking donkey's years to get it all working and organised! Of course, part of the problem is that I'm doing all the sorting that I should have done long before now. But it was so tedious to do it on the old system, while it got slower and slllooowwer and sllllooooowwwer — until I had to reboot just to get a folder open. At least that doesn't happen with XP and the thumbnails and tags really help to sort files and see where there is duplication or just plain junk.

It's kind of fun! And it's just plain boring at the same time.

See, two minds.

An interesting side effect of all this is finding things I forgot I have and also finding out what won't work anymore. There are old programs on floppy (New Computer doesn't have a floppy drive!) and program disks that are missing so all the files associated with them are no longer accessible. At least for the foreseeable future I have my nifty-neato switch so I can go from Old Computer to New Computer and back again in an instant. I'm finding I go back less and less however. I'm enjoying the new fresh look of everything and the fast response of the new OS, so it's getting harder to go back to old and slow. But until I get my scanner and zip hooked up and the files-without-an-application problems sorted, I can't let go of Old Computer totally. Besides, it's served me well for 6 years, except for the hard drive crash and the toasted CD drive. (Even the crash wasn't permanent – dropping it on the floor fixed it and it's still functioning. Too bad we wiped the data before we dropped it!) I wouldn't even have gotten a new one if the old would run new programs and updates. The poor thing just doesn't have what it takes anymore!

So what do you do with older computer equipment that actually still works? I've got several items in the list besides the old CPU box: printer (with cartridges!), keyboard, mouse, parallel zip drive (we swapped for a SCSI one), and I don't know what else. Oh yeah, a Mac Classic! If they were totally non-functional it's an easy choice to trash 'em. But they still work and nobody wants them. Sad, don't you think?

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