Early Christmas Present

Shortly before Thanksgiving, my laptop bit the big one.  I noticed it had been getting very slow and applications were not responding.  I opened it up last week and immediately got the "blue screen of death" and then tried to recover and it would not boot.  So I figured since it was 7 years old and running Vista, it was time for a new one and since Christmas is just around the corner...  I was kind of afraid of using the new operating system because all I had seen of it was the tiled user interface that I see on the TV ads.  However, I gathered up my courage and went PC shopping right before the mad rush for Black Friday.

I found a great little Lenovo Ideabook PC at Office Max for a good price with slightly more powerful configuration that I was looking for.  I ended up buying it online and the picked it up at the store on Wednesday night.  I have been playing with it over the Thanksgiving holiday and found that Windows 8 is really not that bad. Of course Google searches on how to do things help tremendously, and I found one blog site which has a whole bunch of information on it. For example I found that the tiled screen is called the Metro UI, so now I will be able to sound at least as if I somewhat know what I am talking about.

So if you are new Windows 8 user, give the site a try.  If you are like me and just kind of jump right in and try stuff without reading the instructions, this can help reduce a great deal of the learning curve frustrations about using a new operating system. Of course, there is still some degree of frustration in using computers just due to the fact that generally Microsoft tends to think they know how you use a computer rather than leaving those decisions up to you. But that is fodder for another blog entry.