Changing computers

Some experiences I’ve had during the switching everything over to the Acer has been better than others have been. One of the better things has been for my writing to be more portable than it’s been before. If I want to write on the porch, the backyard or the bedroom it’s easily available now. Going to the park and writing is also a viable option now. This net book only weighs I think two pounds and lasts a very long time on a battery charge. When it is plugged in it uses a total of 40 watts, less than most incandescent light bulbs.

I liked the idea so much that Brandy is getting a new laptop and we will no longer use the tower system as of a little later this month. We won’t get rid of it completely as it will work well for a backup when necessary. Both laptops will use about 80 watts running at the same time. I believe the tower system used about 500 watts. Our electric bill should drop soon. Considering the HP was running about 14 hours per day before that makes a savings of about 5 ½ kw per day. If the calculator is right it’s about 150 kw per month. It figures to about $18 per month or $216 per year. Basically in four years they’ve paid for themselves just in electric savings alone.

Make sure you back your files. Thankfully I had most of them backed up but not all of them. I used to try to make sure every document was backed up on DVD which worked well. That however is not an option any more since I got the Acer that I’m writing this on as it doesn’t have a DVD drive. At least there’s a way to do it on a thumb drive. Preferably it’s on a micro SD card in a card convertor since they hook up to so many different things so easily. I think the one I have now is an 8GB. That’s actually large enough for

Probably the biggest pain of all has been with moving Microsoft Office to this machine. They have not made it very easy at least for the activation to take place. It’s a cake run the first time but not when you change machines. It just won’t activate even after removing Office off of the first machine. What you usually end up having to do is open the activation window and call the number. I think in the little window there are 9 blocks of 6 numbers each. These you will need to give the computer you’re talking to when it finally comes on. After it validates the numbers it then gives you another 9 blocks of 6 numbers which you will type in the little boxes.

I’m probably going to have one last thing that will be a pain as of yet. The anti-virus software will still need to be moved from the tower to Brandy’s new laptop. While it’s probably not a major hassle I’m still expecting some waiting time on the phone. Now for my computer I noticed that little link on the Microsoft Office page for free anti-virus software. They have one called Microsoft Security Essentials that I guess is designed for businesses. It seems to work pretty well but time will tell.