A brief tech update:

BZ As Druid

BZ’s Druid cowl and analog sword

My wife and I have a pact.

She stays away from plants, because she has what some call the proverbial Black Thumb.  Most plants she touches die.  I handle the plants at the homes.

Conversely, I am the family Druid, the Luddite.  I am as tech-savvy as a pair of worn socks in your dresser drawer.  I stay away from the technology and let her handle the bulk of it.

Recently, for example — on WordPress, which powers this blog — I uploaded one single, solitary plugin.  I’ve loaded plugins before on WordPress but this plugin somehow crashed my entire blog about two weeks ago.  I couldn’t even access the dashboard in order to discover which plugin was responsible.

Luckily, my tech guru is Robert, who is the I.T. expert for the blog consortium of myself, Texas Fred, American & Proud, The Right Handed Cowboy and The O Word.

Robert was able to suss out the problem, un-crash everything, and bring my blog back up.  God bless him.  But absent his intervention, my digital world would have remained shattered.

That said, I’ve had — like most all of you, I suspect — damned near thousands of computers to date.  And today I updated the one at my wife’s house in Ghetto Centrale.

Right now I’m typing my last post, for a while, on my Sony Vaio 15″ laptop.  It’s been a great machine, not a hiccup to it, ever, with a great keyboard.  I really like its keyboard, illuminated as it is in white, with a crisp strike, and very responsive.  But it’s no Toshiba all-in-one, like the 25″ screen I have at the cabin in the Sierra Nevadas.  It’s a remarkably sharp touchscreen with no cables or wires or confusion.  It has a wireless keyboard and a wireless mouse.  I, however, dislike touching screens because I have to reach.  And you have to clean the screen.

Samsung-dp700a3d-a01usToday, as a replacement for the Sony Vaio, I purchased a 27″ Samsung Series 7, with an Intel® Core™ i7 processor, 10 gigs of RAM and 2 TB hard drive.  Another all-in-one with a power cord and that’s it.

This will be my new confuser down here in Ghetto Centrale, at my wife’s house.

One niggling little problem: it has Windows 8 loaded.  And, from what I’ve seen, I don’t like Windows 8.  You cannot get any new PC without Windows 8.  But apparently you can revert back to something similar to Windows 7 and the desktop with the START.

For shite’s sake, I don’t want to re-learn some new OS every damned 6 months.

Thoughts, anyone, on my purchases or Windows or PCs or Macs or desktops or all-in-ones or tablets or anything else digital?

BZ