Computing Reeducation

As many of you know the motherboard on my desktop died last Friday. A new replacement one has been ordered and hopefully I'll be back doing my thang on Computer Prime soon.

In the meantime, Polar graciously lent me his Compaq laptop in order to tide me over until I get my beloved desktop up and running.

I have owned a computer since I bought my first HP 2600 series minidesktop back in 1997. I prefer and love desktops probably because the vast majority of my computing time and Web surfing over the last decade has been spent in a desktop environment.

Since I've never owned one, much less played with one for an extended period of time until now, it has taken me a few days to get acclimated to the quirks and idiosyncracies inherent in laptop computing.

It took two days for me to get out of the habit reaching to my right and using my right hand to manipulate a mouse to do whatever I needed to do while typing various posts. My thumb kept brushing the pointer thingy and moving my cursor as I typed, which kept pissing me off while typing the first post I attempted to do.

It also took me far longer time wise to compose that first laptop generated post than it normally does on my desktop system.

I had to adjust some of my computer quirks I feel comfortable doing as well.

I use a technique in which I rapidly move the cursor instead of just highlighting the messed up text and hitting the 'delete' key. I had to not only go back and correct the jacked up text, but figure out how to move the cursor to do it.

I type 55 WPM as well, so it's slowed down my typing speed as I've had to get acclimated to holding my hands up in a much higher position than normal and being cognizant of not trying to inadvertantly hitting combinations of keys that may trigger stuff I don't want or need to happen.

I'm relearning how to cut and paste on this laptop. I'm also trying to figure out what I have to do so I can start putting photos back in my posts to make them look nice and illustrate what my words have to say.

Yeah, I could simply call Polar and ask, but the Taurus in me wants to at least try to do it on my own before punting and dialing up the Bear Cave to ask him.

But now that I've had the opportunity to play with a laptop, I have to admit that I'm beginning to like it enough to the point I may seriously consider buying one in the future as a backup.

The price has come down on them and the computing power is going way up. The portability is also a nice selling point as well.

It would help me in terms of being able to access info during my lobbying trips to DC. If I need to blog while I'm on one of my road trips I won't need to hunt for a desktop so I can do so. It would allow me a more rapid response time as well in those situations.

So yeah, my desktop being down sucks. It puts a crimp in some of the stuff I like to do while composing posts, but I can always go back and paste the photos on them later.

In the meantime, I'm going to start making lemonade out of this lemon situation and get 'ejumacated' on the mysteries of laptop computing.