New Toys

After a long time of suffering (I bought my Thinkpad 6+ years ago and got my Latitude 5 years ago) with two old bricks (large computers), we took a trip to the computer store last week.  The plan was to get a new computer for each of us, but in the end, we changed our minds a bit.  Rather than spend $500 each, which was the plan, we opted for buying Angela a super small, super light computer that is basically a tablet running Windows in the shape of a laptop.  It only cost about $200.  It won't win any speed awards, but it will be sufficient for her to email and work with documents.  Also, it will be the computer used to manage the iPad and her iPhone, which will require an external hard drive since it only has a 64GB drive inside.  It runs Windows 10, which so far looks pretty good.

Then for me, I asked about laptops with a pointer stick, and basically the only computer with that is a Lenovo (IBM) Thinkpad.  I bought one of these 5 years ago and it's now a brick, but still running. With a $1000+ price tag, I thought it might not be the best use of money.  The owner of the computer shop suggested I change my hard drive to a Solid State Drive in my old computer and see the speed difference.  He also suggested upgrading the RAM.  I upgraded the hard drive and put my old drive in the CD drive bay.  Doing this made the upgrade much faster, and I can slowly copy files as needed.  The new hard drive is only 120GB, so having the second hard drive will be much more useful than the DVD drive that I used about once a year.

After upgrading to Windows 10, I have what feels like a new computer, but the keyboard and all is like my old one.  So far I like Windows 10.  It's not too different from 7, which I really liked.  I was skeptical, but since I was looking forward to getting a new computer, this was the closest compromise.  I plan to upgrade the RAM too, but even with that, I will have spent less than $100 on the upgrade, and I get to keep my pointer stick (I actually upgraded my Dell Latitude, which is similar to my ThinkPad... I may eventually upgrade the ThinkPad the same way).