The weather here in Central Texas has been kind of difficult. It has warmed up a bit through the days but more often than not, it has been raining throughout most of the time. Not heavy rain but enough to keep me indoors and not out in the garden or hiking the trails where I would rather be.

At the same time, my computer which is an older model, was running out of space on the hard drive and although I moved as much stuff as I could to different drives that I have hooked up, it was getting real close to full. I thought about for a bit and came to the decision that I needed to buy a new computer as to add a bigger hard drive was going to cost me at least $400.00. I had seen computers in the Best Buy store close to me that were going for that and even a bit less so it made sense to buy new.

I talked to a salesperson after spending time reviewing my options and settled on one that had the really fast operating system and lots of storage space with all of the other bells and whistles like a touch screen and facial recognition, the latter nice but not necessary. They did not have one quite like the one I wanted but had an “open box” model almost the same which I figured was a good buy as it was saving me an additional $180.00. The total price at the end for this model was around $850.00 which was more than I was originally going to spend but did give me the faster chip and lots of memory and storage space.

I spent a couple of days setting up the new machine reinstalling most of the programs that I use and  generally had it running as I wanted it. Apart from the facial recognition and the touch screen and of course the space on the hard drive, it was no faster than my old one. It was also much slower in booting up some of which was probably due to loading newer stuff that was not on my old computer. The screen was also a bit smaller resulting in the print being smaller which was bit of a strain on my old eyes.

I thought about it for a bit and made a search for Computer Repair Specialists other than Best Buys Geek Squad where everything started at $100.00 and found an independent business located not too far from me. I called the guy up and we chatted for a while and he told me to bring my old computer over and he would take a look. Long story short, he discovered that the gentleman I had originally bought the computer from was a bit of a computer genius and had modified it by removing the disc player and installing a super fast SSD drive so in essence, I had two hard drives, one of which still had a lot of storage space. He proceeded to move as much as he could from the main drive to the secondary drive resulting in gaining almost 50% more room on the main drive. This meant that my old computer was back in business and as an additional bonus, the total charges for this service was just a little over $70.00, a far cry from the cost of the new computer or for the $400.00 for the work that the Geek Squad was going to do.

I thought about it for a bit and then spent the next two days cleaning up the new computer taking off all of my programs and information. Satisfied that it was as clean as I could get it and knowing that in order to sell it, the Geek Squad would have to format the disk to wipe it clean and reinstall whatever they needed on it. I packed it back in the box and returned it to the store within the 14 days that was allotted as the return time. Other than checking  that it wasn’t damaged, Best Buy returned my money back onto my credit card with no questions asked.

I did run into a problem on my old computer with Outlook which is my email program of choice and spent the next two days working on that. I figured out where and what Outlook was saving with my information and files and eventually with the very last try of the day, as I was pretty fed up with not getting it to work, the program did what it was supposed to do and all of the recent files came alive, all 3000 of them. Satisfied with the results, I left cleaning up the unwanted files to the next day.

The bottom line is that although my computer doesn’t have a touch screen or facial recognition, those are things I can do without. I took special note of the times I used the touch screen and it was almost zero as I preferred to use a mouse so there is no loss there. As for the facial recognition, I am well used to typing in my password at the start of the day so no biggie there either.

The moral to this story is to check out all of the options before settling on the first one you think of. Spending time on a little more research of what is available can be well worth it.

Now, I am waiting for the weather to clear up so that I can get back outdoors as I no longer have an excuse to not be out there. Besides, I need more pictures to work on and material for the new blogs to write. Maybe, the Osprey is back…

Written 3/5/2018