Lake Neuron

To make a long story short, I acquired a used laptop yesterday, quite unexpectedly. I had a previous used laptop, a few years ago, which had a loose battery door when I got it and and which I used as if it were a desktop, with an external keyboard and mouse, until it died and I bought a desktop to replace it. I never took it anywhere. This is the first time I’ve ever had an actual laptop, over and above my desktop, for the purpose of taking it places.

The laptop is a few years old and PCPitstop tells me I need more memory, but it seems to work fine.

Of course, as is the way with computers, it will take me weeks to get it tuned up to work the way I want it. I spent yesterday updating the Windows XP to Service Pack 2, running a registry cleaner and installing things like Firefox and OpenOffice.org (The laptop already has an older version of MS Office installed, but at this point I’m used to OpenOffice and I’m more comfortable using it.) The modem driver was mysteriously missing, but after talking to my West Coast brother I found the driver online and downloaded it, so I can get dial-up access if I ever need it to send back a news story from somewhere. I’ve downloaded several other drivers from the manufacturer’s web site, just to make sure I have the latest versions, and I’ll install those this evening.

I’m guest-blogging at Music City Bloggers this weekend, so between that and tinkering with the laptop I will spend way too much time at various keyboards.