Pack Up My Belongings, I've Got To Get Away

 So about 20 years ago, I was trying to get things figured out for moving.  I was going to a place where I didn't have a great deal of personal space to work with and no internet access in any way, shape or form.  It was also almost an hour away from where I worked, so things were weird there too.

I only spent about a week living there before I packed up my stuff, again, and came back somewhere closer.

I'm entertained to note that the computer I was attempting to put together at the time, for the reason I was trying to put it together, wasn't easily done in those days, but now it is a way of life. Especially for me.

My aim was to downsize a desktop to a laptop footprint and use a USB hard drive as a permanent, high-speed storage addition. In those days, anything that I could get my hands on would not have come with a reasonable number of USB ports, and USB 2.0 was a maybe.  External hard drive? Hah!

I did end up building one out of a USB CD-ROM enclosure at some point shortly thereafter. It looked like a mess, but it did the job well enough.

I did eventually get a laptop for pretty cheap that could run what I needed it to run, but by then I was a little more established with life.

These days I have a few things going on that weren't a thing previously.

I spent several years running my home network data off an old Dell rack server (Which I don't appear to have ever mentioned anywhere here), and an HP network switch that were given to me.  I had to do a little updating on the server to get everything set up the way I wanted to, but it worked.  

Here is where things get relevant:

Once I moved into a smaller house, that didn't have someplace I could run a giant server and switch, I had to figure something else out.

I am now running everything that was previously on the server, which ONLY (I know, I know) ~6TB of storage space to a 8TB USB hard drive plugged into my primary desktop PC.

I could, however, run it off a laptop these days, because they are now powerful enough to stream high quality video and audio in the background and not suffer from too much in the way of performance issues.

It's crazy what twenty years can do. 

You Can’t Judge A Book By Lookin’ At The Cover

 

Got a ChromeBook today.

I am, in fact, updating this blog from said ChromeBook today.

I’ve never used one of these things before, I always thought they were somewhat stupid, honestly. Well, now I’ve used one and my belief is bordering somewhere along maybe not super stupid, and possibly somewhat useful, depending on the task the task.

Chrome OS is now, apparently on version 78, so I assume there has been some pretty serious work done on it over the years. Mine had version 61 out of the box, and it took less than 10 minutes to update to the current version over the Starbucks WiFi.

This particular computer is an HP Chromebook 11-V010NR which is rated pretty decently for a super inexpensive PC. It has 4gb of RAM and 16gb of built in storage. It boasts an 11 inch display, 1 HDMI port, 2 USB (3.0?) ports, an audio output and a Micro-SD slot. Allegedly the battery will last something along the lines of 10 hours, and with virtually no moving parts, that is probably not a hard claim to actually adhere to.

At a guess, I would have to say that this thing will do a pretty good job of what it is made for…Surfing the web, light document creation and editing, playing a few lightweight games and scrolling mindlessly through Facebook/Instagram/Twitter.

I haven’t yet ventured into the world of photo editing or graphic design, which is primarily what I am using PCs for these days, but I don’t expect things to be all that great on that front, since, well, Chromebook.

So far as I can tell, Word and Excel are pretty solid and more or less fully functional, there will just be a learning curve associated with figuring out where everything lives now.

I don’t understand why Microsoft doesn’t port Publisher to other operating systems, because that would make this thing a lot more likely to come out of my bag rather than the laptop, but, alas.

I am having a much easier time adjusting to this than my iMac, partially because a lot of the shortcut key combinations still work, but I do miss the F keys, along with the fact that there are certain things I have to look up. For instance, screen shots, but either I will adjust or I will never use this thing again after today.

Amazon Music is streaming well and the sound is quite excellent via the headphone jack at least!

This thing doesn’t seem likely to be consigned to the “Never to be used again” pile of computer crap that I own though. I’ll probably use it for what it is designed for. Doing simple tasks quickly, watching videos and streaming music.

We Opened The Window, Played Some Nintendo

Original Title: Tops of Desks…

So, yeah
Just decided to completely change the look and feel of the desktop on the computer.

Still the Windows 2000