Oh, my darlings, we are back in business! Thanks to you, I was able to get a gorgeous new HP Pavillion last night. Mind you, I only intended to price a few machines and do some further research, but Office Depot had a superfast, superpowerful laptop on a smokin’ hot sale ending yesterday, so here we are today!
The Woodinville location was fresh out, so I had to battle through rush-hour traffic to Lynnwood to get her. Then I had to battle my overprotective bank, which was all like, “You haven’t spent this much on a computer in, like, half a decade,” and I had to call them twice to say, “Ya rly it’s me! LEMME BUY MY ‘PUTER!” And they finally did.
I didn’t want to stumble through setup whilst exhausted, so I left it safe in its box and got a good night’s sleep before I started it up. Misha, of course, decided to help.
After ushering the cat off to one side, we were ready to begin.
Of course, setting up a new computer takes time. There’s updates, and downloads, and questions, and annoying invasive nosy bits to turn off, so Misha got bored and took a nap with the packing material as a pillow.
And now, I have gotten everything to the point where I can actually write again! HUZZAH!
I’ll be sending out personal thanks to those who donated and offered other assistance over the next few days. I cannot thank you enough! You took me from abject despair to boundless hope overnight (and it would’ve been sooner if I hadn’t had to crawl away from everything and hide in a cave to shut my anxiety down. Stupid bloody anxiety disorder). I was able to get the best machine I’ve ever owned because of your generosity. I’ll even be able to bust out the Wacom tablet again, which I haven’t been able to use since the powerful beast died last year! I have a 10-key pad! I CAN DOWNLOAD MY MUSIC!!! And listen to it while writing a post and editing photos! My productivity is going to go way up now that I have a machine that can efficiently multi-task.
So you can probably see why I view each and every one of you as a miracle worker.
(No, I’m not crying! My eyes are raining. That’s all.)
Enjoy writing with a cat parked on the keyboard mwahahaha!
Well heck, that all happened while I was busy, so I missed it entirely. Glad to see it got funded and purchased so fast! More exciting writing for me to read!
If the hard drive in the old one is not completely dead, you can get an external USB hard drive case for it, dissect it out of the old computer, and use it as backup storage (be careful: if you think your system may have had malware, do not plug your old hard drive into your new computer!)
Remember to create a non-privileged account to do your web surfing, emailing, and writing with; ideally install the “child protection pack” and create a child protection profile for your internet account, then lock it so that it can only run applications you install as the administrator (hint: firefox and fuck all else) If you can’t do that, then make sure you install a script blocker and ad blocker in firefox and never whitelist java sites, seldom whitelist flash sites, and be entirely comfortable saying “fuck them” regarding sites that make money on ads. Even FTB. Sites that make money on ads are reselling your browser execution cycles to sites that resell malware. They may not know it or be able to admit it but that’s what’s happening. Fuck them. If you’re willing to pay for a subscription, do – for everyone else, run ad blocker pro
Also: install and use LastPass.
Or get owned by creepy internet stalkers. Period. Since you’re a blogger and go to lots of sites you are ridiculously susceptible to cross-site scripting attacks.
Great news! Very glad to read this. :-)
PS – Dana if you don’t have a USB hard drive for backups, LMK. I have a 2TB USB drive and a case I can donate (you know how to reach me) having survivable data is _crucial_ and solves a lot of security problems, too. Every year I have clients that spend a lot on recovery, whereas loss prevention through redundancy is cheap and easy.
If we could have a copy of you in Ohio we wouldn’t have to worry that our only Dana Hunter lives in the subduction zone!
A duplicate Dana would be fantastic. (Oh, is that what dd stands for?)
We made the happy happen! Huzzah! After this weekend, I really needed to hear some good news, and this hits the spot. Yay!