dianaschnuth

It’s been 7½ years since this happened:

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A few days ago, Aaron took a look at my old iPod Classic sitting on the speaker dock in the living room and noticed that its battery had swelled up so much as to bust the plastic clips on the case.

Yikes.

Luckily, replacement batteries are still available on Amazon — at about half the cost of seven years ago. I ordered a battery on Sunday evening (entirely paid for with Rewards Points from my Amazon Visa), and it arrived in the mail today.

Even though I should be in bed trying to fall asleep right now, I decided not only to try installing it — hey, Aaron did the hard part of getting the original battery unstuck from the case years ago — but I also decided to document the process, just because.

The battery had helpfully popped the case open for me, so I barely used the prying tools that came with the battery. That old battery is poofed up like a pillow. Eww.

Just to make sure I was doing it right, I pulled up a YouTube video on ye olde laptop to refresh my memory on the innards of my iPod. The only slightly tricky part this time around was getting the tiny ribbon cable in place and then locking it there.

But, hot damn, I did it!

The clips holding the front piece to the back piece really are busted, so we’ll have to be gentle with it from now on… but it works!

I’ve been meaning to refresh the music on this bad boy for literally years, so I guess now’s as good a time as any.

–Well, I mean, not RIGHT now. Right now, I need to get my ass up to bed. But I will do so with a righteous sense of accomplishment.

My Dell XPS 7100 is older than my first-grader.

Honestly, I don’t carve out a whole lot of time to sit down at my desktop PC these days, but I still wouldn’t want to do without it. I have my phone for doing everyday tasks, and I have my laptop for blogging and websurfing, but my desktop PC is where I do anything that either needs real processing power or needs access to my external hard drives — photo editing, video editing, syncing my phone, messing around with data in Excel, etc.

Once upon a time, I played so much Civilization that the hardware requirements of the newest version drove my need desire for a new PC — twice. Last week, what drove me to buy a new PC was the realization that the reason I didn’t spend much time on my computer was because it was slow and clunky and irritating.

Once I had that epiphany, I pulled up the Dell website and got my research on.

I only really get “into” computer specs when I’m in the market for a new one, so I had to refamiliarize myself with what the newest processors are. I ended up getting myself an Inspiron 3670 with an 8th Generation i5-8400 2.8GHz processor, a separate graphics card (NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 with 2GB GDDR5 Graphics Memory), and 8 GB of RAM — enough to suit my needs. The only thing I missed out on getting was an eSATA connection — I totally forgot that one of my hard drives had that option. I’d only used it before because I ran out of USB ports… which, of course, I did again when I set up my new tower last night. Nothing a new USB 3.0 hub from Amazon can’t fix. That’ll be showing up tomorrow, thanks to Amazon Prime.

My spiffy new tower is all ready to go — now it’s time to install software.

Back in my young adulthood, I was known to seek out “free” software online. I figured, hell, I wasn’t really in the market to pay that much for the software, so it’s not really stealing… right? Suuuure. Now that I have more than two quarters to rub together, though, I’ve been trying to accumulate some software on physical media via eBay. (I still don’t need to pay more for Photoshop than I did for my new computer, especially when I’m only going to launch it maybe once a month.) I’ve already gotten myself a prior version of Adobe Premiere Pro on disc — one of my coworkers was aghast that I’d prefer that over subscribing to Creative Cloud — and just today I scored a reasonably-priced older version of Photoshop. I also purchased Microsoft Office Professional 2019 for $16 through my work, and am installing it as I type this.

(I feel like an idiot, though, because… wait for it… my desk is so disorganized that I don’t know where my $400 piece of video editing software even is. I bought it three years ago, installed it, and stored the physical media… somewhere. *facepalm*)

I’m feeling pretty good about my purchases. Now I just need to finish cleaning and organizing my desk area, and I’ll have a usable and inviting home office once again.