K, so I signed up for the free upgrade on three of my four computers. Laptops were done, yesterday. I opted to upgrade my newest laptop first, the awesome Dell Inspiron with touchscreen capabilities, cause I figured it would really enhance it. I wasn’t disappointed! Upgrade was done without a hitch, took maybe 15-20 minutes total and I finished [pretty much] setting up that laptop for my use – although I do still have a few small things to adjust yet, but no biggie. Checked my desk top, but the upgrade notice for it still hadn’t come in. So I moved to my older laptop, affectionately called the purple laptop.
The purple laptop is my five year old Dell Inspiron, used exclusively for school. The newer Dell will be my dedicated writing laptop in the very near future, as I am setting it up slowly, working around my school schedule… it’s lighter than the purple laptop, so I can see myself packing it up and taking it with me, more than I do the purple one.
I had a ton [i.e. an excess of twenty-five] windows open on my purple laptop, the rewards of my research for my school paper. Having recently lost my old blog and a folder filled with graphics I created, I was very mindful of save, save, save before starting the upgrade. So I went through all window tabs and either bookmarked for later reading, or saved pages that were actually pdf’s, to my desktop. I saved the work I had already done on the paper due this Sunday, closed everything I wasn’t using and began the upgrade. Took slightly longer for the download than the new Dell, but no complaints because there was a lot of data streaming from the house at the time. Once the download was complete, I began the upgrade process. Again, it was smooth, Microsoft did a pretty good job on making the transition easy; timing of upgrade was slightly longer than the new Dell’s upgrade, but the app stuff was pretty much all new to the purple laptop, so again, no real complaints.
However, once finished with the upgrade, I logged in to do more work to my paper. Settings had changed, it was now a ‘read-only’ document. Huh. Okay, I know the button to click off to stop an item being read-only… it wasn’t clicked. Huh. So I decided to use the good old save as and create a clean copy to finish working on… kept getting a Microsoft error message that I wasn’t allowed to use this Word feature, that I needed to check with the computer’s Administrator. Uh, that’s me, guys! It asked if I wanted to do a plain old save to the file, in My Documents. I figure why not, I can finish my paper and then move the corrected document to the folder it should be in and overwrite the read-only copy. Same message, I’m not allowed to do this and must gain the computer Administrator’s permission. Uh, guys> That’s still me….
I had to go through many, many, many steps to tell my faithful purple laptop that yes, I am the Administrator and that I ‘own’ the folder and all subfolders and files associated with it. By the time I figured this out and actually did it, it was early morning. So I didn’t work on the paper – and also had noticed that all of the annotated bibliography stuff I had written [I really hate writing annotated bibliographies!] was never saved, even though my Word documents are all set up to do an auto-save every ten minutes.
Apparently Microsoft, in all of its wisdom, chose to rename how things are done and where items go, with the new OS. For security purposes, mainly. Kudos for that, I suppose. However, with the new OS, my purple laptop no longer had my original Administrator account, AdminST. That account was the one that dealt with all system ‘business’ and gave permissions to my slightly lesser account, Shari, which mainly used Word and occasionally Paint Shop Pro 7; AdminST oversaw all installations and stuff, determining where things should be installed and who all had access. Business stuff. Might seem redundant since Shari and AdminST are the same person, but it was my own security protocol in case I allowed anyone else use of the laptop. The new OS got rid of AdminST and made Shari the Administrator – but locked things down so Shari had to search and find out how and where to go to get access back over her own darn computer! Now, instead of ‘My Documents’ where all important stuff was moved to, you know, the stuff you wanted to be sure was protected in case of crashes or recoveries, now I have ‘File Explorer’ to look for items… I guess File Explorer basically covers the old My Documents and Programs and all that mundane stuff [read sarcasm there, folks!]
My purple laptop is not touchscreen enabled, so it will never use the ‘tablet’ style built into the new OS. [Although I confess I adore it in my new Dell.] The newer security features seem pretty good, but I dislike hiding areas I, as Administrator, would need to visit periodically – like ‘My Computer’ among others. Hey Microsoft, why not build a style that resembles our original computer so that those PC’s that are not touchscreen enabled and likely never going to use the newer tablet style, can use – but with all of your new security built in? Wouldn’t that make more sense? I mean, I’m all for progress, but some of us simply cannot afford to purchase brand new computers every time you choose to upgrade, or once a year – whichever comes first. And I’m certainly not going to throw away/dispose of/trade-in my faithful purple laptop because it doesn’t have the capabilities to utilize the apps/touchscreen stuff, either. So how about some kind of happy middle ground for these older, still definitely usable, PC’s?
So now I’m really worried about my desktop. I use this for lots of things – creating graphics, web page design, some writing and blogging, playing games, relaxing on the web, email… and it’s at least four years older than my purple laptop. Still fast enough and according to Microsoft’s check, can handle the upgrade to the new OS. It also have several user profiles on it… my own Admin account and an Admin account for S, since he use to do the majority of repairs and stuff for my PC’s. His account had VPN access to my other PC’s for maintenance/repair purposes. I also have a user account for Joe, and one for Guests. But from what I saw on my purple laptop, all of those will go away. Now, don’t get me wrong, Microsoft does allow you to create new user profiles in the new OS. But, they must be associated with a Microsoft [Hotmail] email address in order to create them. I don’t want more Hotmail addresses, I have several domains I own and prefer to use them for any email address I might need. Plus the need to go through this PC and reclaim ownership of everything I already own. [Sorry, but that’s just plain stupid to me!]
So, the upgrade on a fairly clean, new laptop – awesome! Upgrade on a slightly older, well used purple laptop – pain in the ass. Upgrade on a much older, also not touchscreen enabled, desktop with loads of life and use left in it? Fear inspiring….
Oh, and by the way, I finished the required annotated bibliographies [*sighs* I so hate annotated bibliographies!] and wrote about half of my paper today. Like I said, it isn’t due until Sunday, so I’m back on schedule.
I am so outtie….