Reconnected to the Internet

My new ASUS ZenBook 13 laptop with its predecessor behind © Ricky Yates

Over five years ago, just a few weeks before I retired, I bought myself a new laptop computer. You can read all about me doing so in a blog post from that time entitled, ‘A Tale of Two Laptops’.

However, in February this year, that laptop completely froze and I was thankful that JCR, Decín were eventually able to carry out repairs to the hard drive and get it functioning again. One corner of the casing was also cracked and it fell apart when being dismantled and had to be internally taped back together. I was therefore advised at the time that my laptop was now getting a bit old 😉

Since then, it has become increasingly slow to load and sometimes crashing whilst loading. Even when loaded, I would frequently get the message, ‘Firefox (my web browser) not responding’, or ‘Thunderbird (my email programme) not responding’, accompanied by a little blue circle going round and round 🙁 Whilst it is not the only reason, it is part of the explanation of why nothing has appeared on this blog for nearly four months.

Therefore in early July, I decided that the time had come to grasp the nettle and buy a new laptop. There followed a perusal of all that was on offer in Datart, before I opted for the one on which I am now compiling this post and featured in the photograph above – an ASUS ZenBook 13.

It was almost the most expensive of of those on offer, short of going over to a Mac. But I chose it for a number of reasons. It is very thin and light – 13.9mm / 1.07 kg according to the specification. It is also much smaller than its predecessor as it doesn’t have a panel of mainly numbers, on the right-hand side. It will therefore be much easier to carry around, something I am sure I will appreciate later this month when I will be travelling for seventeen days. It also means there is now more space on my desk so I can go from typing to writing on paper, without having to move the laptop or the paper 🙂

By previous agreement, yesterday morning I took both the old and new laptops to JCR, Decín, so they could set up the new laptop and transfer all of my files, photographs etc, from one to the other. Actually, they have copied everything so my old laptop still has all I’ve created, up to the evening of Sunday 31^st July 2022. In setting up the new laptop, I specifically asked that it, together with Firefox and Thunderbird, be made to speak to me in English (UK) and not in Czech or Slovak, which are usually the other two options.

Just over 24 hours later, I got a text message to say that everything was complete. So after a quick trip into Decín to collect and pay 😉 , I’ve spent the last few hours getting to know my new laptop, enjoying the speed at which it functions and not being frustrated by unwanted messages and whirring little blue circles.

I still have few things to sort out. I haven’t yet made it link to my mobile phone which I managed to do with the old laptop. And unfortunately, the new laptop only has one socket or port, that will take both the receiver for my mouse and the connecting cable for my printer/scanner/copier. I may need to buy a new mouse with a receiver that will fit into an unused port of a different shape.

But after all of the frustrations and wasted time of the past few months, it is very nice to be once more be fully and reliably reconnected to the internet. Therefore in celebration, I’ve written and published this post 🙂