Misadventures in PC Buying

OK so I took the day off from work because I felt like crap. In addition to that I start back to class tomorrow and I figured I could get away with missing a day in order to have a 'mental health day'. It felt great. Not only did I get to sleep in a few hours later than normal, my girlfriend and I ended up going to Best Buy to pick me a net book.

It wasn’t my intention today to actually buy the damn thing, after all we do have a laptop that we share. But in the last week or so since I have been posting more frequently, I have kind of been hogging the computer. With the possibility that I may end up actually writing articles for magazines, plus the fact that my classes will be starting tomorrow, we decided that the benefits out weighed the cons. So we purchased the strangely named Eee PC from ASUS. Now this is by no means a paid advertisement for ASUS, but if you are going to buy a PC definitely get an ASUS.

Anyways, I had figured that after the purchase of the net book I would quickly be able to get back to working on my article. Boy oh boy how wrong could I be? Once we got home I had to do the initial boot of the computer. That took about 15 minutes. Next I had to go about the oh so important process of installing necessary programs (read Mozilla Firefox, IE 8 can go jump off a bridge). When finally this was accomplished, I was able to set up my home group in order to move over my old documents. These included my articles for Binnall of America, backups for Forteania, and my article for the magazine. Once this was accomplished I decided to get working back on the article. Once I opened (or attempted to open) the document. Blam! A little pop up came that extolled me to either activate my version of Microsoft Office 2010 (don't have one), purchase a version from the online store (definitely not going to happen), or use the kind of shitty Microsoft Starter version of Word. So as I didn't want to do any of those things, I opted for downloading Open Office. The download took all of about 3 hours.

3 grueling hours later Open Office was finally ready to be installed. Once this process completed, which surprisingly didn't take all that long to do. It was at this moment that the computer happily informed me that 31 updates were ready to be installed for the computer. Evidently these were vital updates that, if they were not installed, could possibly result in the destruction of all mankind. Well you can sleep well tonight with the knowledge that I decided to spare all of your lives by installing the necessary updates. (No thanks needed, just send money). Finally everything was updated and I was good to go. So I opened up my article.... only to discover that I was actually working with an older version that had about 1000 fewer words than my new one. Luckily I had a jump drive nearby , loaded the latest version of the article.

So here we are almost 8 hours after the purchase of my net book and I am finally ready to get started on my article. Of course it was about that time that I realized I hadn't blogged all day, and that about brings you up to speed. I will be posting again a little later tonight, after I have hopefully gotten a chance to make a dent into my article. Until then this is your friendly neighborhood Closet Fortean (and proud new owner of an ASUS net book) saying catch you on the flip side.