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Tech Upgrade

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.

My Desk

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Interesting Interactions

Wow. Well. I thought I was coming to the coffee shop to write about my new desktop computer, but then I sat down next to the most fascinating woman. Yes, fascinating in that sort of Why Did You Choose To Speak To Me sort of way.

The internet is a wide open place, so I won’t divulge all the intel she gave me, but the conversation began with her finding my Bluetooth keyboard amazing and ended with her informing me that her intelligence doubled last night due to a “high-profile” incident and that God told her that he is dumb compared to her. In between, she told me about how Iran are pros at stealing credit card numbers, how Europe gets all the best tech first and the US is kept technologically in the dark and treated like a third-world country, and how her family came illegally by boat from Germany.

That was a Very Interesting twenty minutes.

 

Edit to Add: Ten minutes later, she started talking to the baristas about how she’s a reincarnated six-month-old baby, and I just had to leave and go write someplace else.