A History of (My) Computers

I've spent quite a bit of time this week working with my new computer. It's really the first computer I've ever owned that is #1 NEW and #2 ALL MINE!!! Not that I'm trying to justify my purchase (even though it is hard for me to spend this kind of money on myself) but I thought I'd summarize a bit of my computer history for posterity:

I've spent the last several years juggling several different computers that could each do one or two things that I need a computer to do but not one of them could do it all. . . My office computer is old but works great for invoices. It has a nice HP printer and has worked great for most of my office needs. Problem: it's OLD. I've been waiting for it to die for a couple of years now. It also can't store/burn my many pictures and it has no Internet connection.

Our home computer is a Dell desk top but the CD-ROM broke a couple of years ago leaving me without a way to burn my pictures onto Cd's . It also came with a huge price tag since it was "free" when I signed my kids up for IDEA. It was so NOT free but that's a story for another day.

I also have a laptop that we bought used at a pawn shop last spring and once we got the icky pictures off the hard drive, it worked pretty good for downloading and storing the event pictures that I took all summer. It also had a wireless card and was easy to transport. Problem: No Microsoft Office. Besides, it died a few months ago taking many of my pictures with it. . .

Meanwhile, I found a nice looking lap top in a box at the cabin and asked my mother-in-law about it. They had picked it up very cheap at a yard sale and she hadn't been able to do much with it. She told me to take it and try it out to see if I could use it. I was pretty excited since it had Office!! Problem: No wireless card. Oh, and it only stays on for about 20 minutes before it hibernates for the rest of the day and it will only power up if the power cord is hung carefully over the top of the screen. . . BUT, I could use my printer with it as long as I could do everything I needed to do in 20 minutes or less.

Last year, my sister gave me an OLD HP laptop that has worked great for the business since it has Office BUT of course, no wireless card, no picture storage, no CD burner and no printer.

Obviously, I need one good computer that can do everything I need without all of the headaches that have come with these other computers!!

This is where my lovely, new, shiny, black Dell Inspiron laptop enters the picture. We had some money set aside for one good computer that could do all of the things I needed it to do but I had no idea what to get. I looked on Craig's List and found plenty of used computers that were in my price range and looked good but I really didn't want another used computer. When Dell had a sale, I jumped at the chance and bought this little beauty:


I'm sure there are better computers out there but this one suits all of my needs at this moment in time. I have spent the week adding things from my other computers and getting it to do all of the things that make my life better and easier!

This is pretty much what I did all week as I loaded up my new toy:

I know, I should have done this a long, long time ago. . .