Hugin Lives

My trusty netbook died on me yesterday.  It has been more than a trooper, having been to England, Rome, San Francisco, DC twice, Nashville, Louisville twice, New Orleans a couple of times, and who knows how many other little local trips.  It has been my travel workhorse banging around in my bag and through airport security.  When I was getting ready to go to England for Spring Break, I noticed that it was behaving badly, blue screening me and so forth, but I had hoped it was a software issue that I had remedied.  Apparently not.

I got on NewEgg and started looking.  I managed to find this Acer Aspire One 722.  It's a dual core netbook, and the difference in performance from my old one to this is completely a night/day thing.  I'm amazed at how well this little computer is working.  It settles my mind in so many ways, not having to worry about the old one dying (because that's over with), not having to worry about it hanging up or being insufficient to the tasks at hand, having about as much horsepower under the hood here as with my big laptop (I think).

I kept the name.  This one, too, is Hugin.  I like my paired ravens from myth, and I still find them appropriate.  Just as I had rechristened my 1GB external hard drive Muninn2, the new netbook is HuginII.  The newest incarnations of my sleek black technological birds can fly and deliver now.

It's been a long day of setting up Hugin and trying to get my desktop in the back office working right again.  I had been very neglectful of the desktop, and the antivirus had run out.  That was the least of the problems.  It was in bad shape.  It took HOURS of work to get it unSNAFUed.  It had to be updated, cleaned out, synched, protected, and generally made functional rather than a liability again.  I could not do computers all day everyday.  I would lose my mind.  There are hours of wait-time while they "do their do," and moments of blood pressure elevating frustration when they refuse to do what you want them to do.  Granted, if I were more technically savvy, I might be able to hack through the latter with greater ease, but some things, I think, just take time to walk through all the steps and stages.

I hate that.

Anyway, I do feel some accomplishment in finally getting this big list of tasks taken care of.  I am thrilled with the new netbook.  It should be perfect for keeping in touch with everyone and keeping them up to date with what is going on during my trip.  While I know that the need for it when I travel indicates the level of my technology addiction, I don't really intend to apologize.