Those of you who know me in real life have heard about my woes over the past year with my MacBook Pro. Two logic boards and a replacement hard drive later, just barely 3 years of ownership, and it is no longer operational. Turns out, a whole lot of them that were sold in 2011 had the same problems and there is potential for a class action lawsuit. In the meantime, I parked my paperweight (after the second logic board failed) and went back to my old Dell, still running Windows XP.
Shawn’s laptop had already been doing a death march so we were both staring down the need for new laptops and no way to easily squeeze them out of the budget. He managed to breathe some new life into his machine by deleting a lot of old and duplicate files. We came into a newer ASUS laptop with a broken screen and decided that might be the answer for one of us. Shawn paid to replace the screen and told me it was mine.
Yesterday, I cracked it open and went through the long process of re-installing Windows8 which mostly went smoothly. Then, while trying to use the laptop, it started glitching and Shawn suggested upgrading to 8.1 to clear past some of the glitches. Doing so got me stuck in a weird upgrade loop where the apps got stuck in “pending” (a known bug) and I spent hours going through troubleshooting “solutions” none of which were able to solve the issue before I gave up for the night — using all my strength not to angrily shatter the laptop into plastic splinters.
The problem is, Windows 8 feels both comfortable and completely foreign. It inhabits an uncanny valley for me where I feel like I have to swim through mud just to do what needs to be done. Nothing is where I expect it to be; it’s as though the engineers tried to replicate MacOS through a Windows lens, and it’s not pretty.
Take, for example, changing the clock time (which was wrong — another known bug). Shawn says, “just right click on the clock in the corner” which works fine in Windows 7 and every Windows OS prior. Not 8 though 8 is special. I had to first search for clock (why did they remove the control panel?? too convenient?) Then choose “change time and date” then confirm that was what I wanted to actually do, next to the little warning dialog. I changed the time, but that didn’t solve my pending update problem.
The other hurdle is the lack of transferable software. We have Adobe CS5 for both Windows and Mac but each is limited to a single license and the Windows one is already installed on Shawn’s computer; the Mac is not transferable. Even the CS3 discs I have are likely not going to work as they are licensed to the Dell.
I use Photoshop a lot. Yes, I could use a freebie program but I know PS and am comfortable with it. I don’t really want to fight to learn a new program. Acrobat Pro is another high-use part of that suite for me and I have yet to find a workable replacement for Dreamweaver for updating those websites that still use HTML instead of a CMS. But, unless I can find a set of discs for CS6 or earlier (with a valid license key), it’s all online cloud based subscription style now.
Likewise, I use Microsoft Office — Word, Excel, Powerpoint — and the next person that tells me I should use Open Office instead is getting a knuckle sandwich. They are NOT interchangeable; if pressed, I will use Google Docs instead. Luckily, my workplace offers a home license of MS Office for peanuts so that one won’t be too difficult to replace.
So what now? Well, until I finish some in-progress projects (primarily the SmoothieJune book which has been MUCH delayed, as much through my own procrastination as my computer issues), it’s back to the Dell.
Maybe in the meantime I will set up the ASUS in another room where I can work on troubleshooting and getting to know it better on my own timeline.
It’s been a little over a year of recurring laptop troubles. I wanna be more like my laptop Buddha…. I’d really like to get back to the zen of using my technology instead of fighting with it.