Computer hell...

I got my royalties for Q1 a couple of weeks ago and decided to buy a new laptop. Now, before you think of me as a hugely extravagant person, can I point out that my old laptop was many years old and still on Windows 7!

The "instructions" on how to set up the laptop were (I kid you not):
1. Connect to power
2. Press the power key
3. Configure the operating system by following the on-screen instructions.

That was it.

I did as I was told and suffered through the annoying Cortana assistance and got some of the basics set up, reasonably easily. I even managed to configure the email manager to access almost all of the email accounts I have (I still have to figure out one...).

Then came the issue of loading up things like Scrivener and my running watch app. That went relatively smoothly.

But then... transferring all my files from my old laptop to the new. The old laptop had something called "Windows Easy Transfer". It's just a shame that the new laptop didn't have any way to talk to that feature. It did however have a "back up and restore" thing linked to Windows 7 and I did manage to get that to work. It just put all the old files in different places to where I was expecting them.

I spent most of last week getting my new laptop into a state where I can actually work on it. Why do they make this so difficult? Surely when most people buy a new laptop, they need to transfer stuff over from their old one, so why isn't there a straightforward way of packaging it all up, moving it to the new machine and unpacking it?

Hopefully, now I have it (almost) set up, I can get back to writing!


Enjoyed reading this? Why not subscribe to my newsletter? It comes out once a month and subscribers get a free novella and all my special offers.
No spam, I promise.


Comments

  1. I've got a Mac and use their 'Time Machine' which I keep on an external hard drive. That does let me upload everything all at once – takes quite a while though.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment