In with the New

I killed my computer Tuesday so Ian and I gathered information and by Wednesday had selected my replacement option.  Kevin Kelly, the editor of Cool Tools, says he considered Costco to be his personal shopper.  He trusts their research so when he needs to buy something, he buys it from them and that's exactly what we did.  We ordered this Toshiba with a terabyte of memory and 12 gb of Ram on Wednesday and UPS delivered it Friday after lunch.  There were absolutely no instructions included and since this is the new Windows 8.1 operating system with touch screen and all new menus, it's been an intense past couple of days.  Ian succeeded in recovering all my photos from the back-up drive and they're now installed here.  I bought a new back-up drive too.

The disappointing thing was that Office 2013 does not include Outlook.  It did come with an email account through Outlook.com but it only supports an iMap but not a pop account.  I have had the same pop email account for 12 years and was not interested in replacing it in the middle of this mess.  I only learned this after I called the Costco Concierge service who connected me with an Microsoft tech.  I had to buy Outlook for $109.99 or replace my email - those were my options.  So I bought it and she logged on to my computer and installed it for me.  When it didn't work, I called my ISP's help line and he corrected the ports and logged in as me, cleaned up the misinformation and now I finally have email.  I wish I liked the operating system as well as I like the computer.  The most annoying thing is the virtual keyboard that pops up every time I touch the screen to identify the spot where I want to type when I'm making a correction.

About weaving - I cut the warp off Arthur.  Now is not the time for an ugly frustrating warp.  I also finished the towels that were on Maudie Mae so have two naked looms again.  Meanwhile, somewhere in the middle of all of this, my contract arrive from Handwoven which I was able to print from my iPad and return.

Now I'm going to spend some more time trying to figure out the things that befuddle me about this computer, like how to highlight, copy and paste and especially how to get rid of the annoying virtual keyboard.