The Gun Counter

My old XP box took a dump, so today between details, I got some advise and went looking for a new laptop. I don't need a lot of power, and I'm not a gamer, so I was looking for something that I could use for net-surfing, word-processing, and general data usage.

Purchased a Toshiba laptop for about $500.00 at the local Office Depot. Did a quick set-up, and I like the little thing. Now, I've got to go home, set it up on my home network and load the printer drivers, but I think that once I get through the learning curve, this little laptop should serve me just fine. The little box has got Windows 8.1, and I don't see the heart-ache that lots of folks complain about, but maybe they've had time to do a little trouble-shooting on the platform.

We'll see, but the first thing I'm going to do this evening is build a recovery disk.

Keep us in the loop.

My main XP box is limping along. I dread transferring programs and data, so I have been nursing her along for the past year.

If you find you can't deal with Windows 8, download Classic Shell. Free program, about a 30 second download. I did it at Chris' suggestion and can't say enough good things about it. Before Classic Shell, I was almost ready to have the machine wiped and Windows 7 installed.

If you can upgrade to win 8 pro, that should give you downgrade rights to Win 7. That's how most professional systems are shipped- 'downgraded' to Win 7 right out of the box.

That explains why my new work laptop came to me from IT with Windows 7, despite it being a brand new HP.

Yup, especially workstation-class machines, are coming by default with Win 8 downgraded to Win 7. Workstation builders aren't even asking me if I want Win 8 on review machines.

rightisright wrote:Keep us in the loop.

My main XP box is limping along. I dread transferring programs and data, so I have been nursing her along for the past year.

Will do. I didn't have time to do anything with it last night, except to do a very basic set-up. Hopefully this evening I'll be off and can play with it for a while. My XP box is still running, but Windoze is ending support for it next week, and if my hunch is correct, there will be a bunch of XP problems cropping up shortly. When the current Windows support page says this

If your current PC can't run Windows 8.1, it might be time to consider shopping for a new one

Then even the dimmest of us (and I'm no tech guru) can see where this is going.

So, I decided to pull the pin and get a new device before everything turns to crap and I haven't migrated my data. Luckily, I keep data updated pretty regularly on a flash drive, and even if the house burns down, I won't lose but about a week's worth of data.

My XP laptop has been freezing up a lot lately, and seems to be doing it more and more as April 8th (the end for XP support) comes closer. So right now I'm running my same XP machine from a Knoppix disk, to try and figure out if this thing is suffering from hardware failures or if it's XP crapping out. At least my data is all currently backed up.

skb12172 wrote:That explains why my new work laptop came to me from IT with Windows 7, despite it being a brand new HP.

They are likely just imaging them with 7, which is what most companies do. The Dells we were getting at my last gig were pre-loaded with 7 but we imaged them with the corporate image anyways.

Even business economics articles have noted the severe downturn in new computer purchases is because of the widespread disgust with Windows 8.
Microsoft has had to order container-shiploads of facepalm just to keep up with in-house demand alone.