New Computer

After a year of hemming and hawing (and laziness and procrastination), Dad and I finally got around to ordering the new computer that we've been meaning to buy for the last year. We originally planned to buy the computer as soon as we finished remodeling the office ... well, the office was finished LAST August, but we're only just getting around to the computer part. Since Dad got the last new computer, this time it was Mama's turn – it's hard to beat a fast processor, nice graphics card, loads of hard drive space, and a really nice 24" LCD widescreen monitor. But, getting all the data transferred and everything up and running properly is proving to be a royal pain in the hiney.

Once we got everything up and running, we discovered that, although the extra hard drive was physically inside the computer, it wasn't operable. After a couple of hours with Dell tech support, the issue was resolved (they screwed up the configuration). We then noticed that the computer was having some fan/overheating issues whenever it came out of standby or hibernate mode. After another few hours with tech support, it seems that problem is less easy to fix. And then, of course, there were the calibration issues with the awesome new monitor – so far it is really awesome, but it's not displaying colors correctly (the out of the box setting on the monitor were ghastly). After trying a slew of software calibration options, we've determined that we need to use a hardware calibrator.

So, with a color-challenged monitor and a semi-functional computer, no pictures have been processed, no blogs have been posted, and we've generally fallen off the face of the planet for several weeks. Since Dell is shipping us a new tower (I won't even bore you with all the grumbling about all the time I wasted transferring files and installing software on the defective tower), I hope we'll back in action soon!