Adventures in Anachronistic Consumerism # 42,984

It’s my own fault. I don’t need much from my computer, email, a word processor (all I want is just a fancy electronic typewriter, really), and access to the internet. Which I had, except that my arthritic HP was pushing eight years old (I think) and getting slower and slower …

So when the missus called me from the warehouse superstore to say she had found a souped-up PC for me, I said thanks, go ahead. It felt like a step forward. It’s got the memory of a million elephants, it’s got a whole mountainside of ram—hoo, baby, I was going to be in the internet fast lane, now.
It sat in my computer room for several weeks, but that’s okay. I didn’t want to try and transfer all my files until it would be easy. And we had a tech guy coming to help us get our Netflix streaming account to begin speaking again with our Dish satellite TV, so this would kill the poor proverbial two birds with a single stone.
I don’t know why Dish and Netflix stopped speaking to each other. They were remotely compatible for a while—perhaps a bit uneasy, re the download time, but it worked for almost a year, I think. And then: the cold shoulder.
Which we resolved in typical workaday world fashion by simply turning a blind eye for quite a while. We could still stream Netflix on the computer, through Comcast, just not on our larger-screen TV. So we kept paying for both, but only using the DVD and streaming rarely to a laptop on the coffee table. Aggravating, but I handled that by ignoring it.
And then our tech guy came out and scratched his head, too, until he got them to kiss and make up. And he also helped me transfer files from old PC to new.
To show how far out of it I am, when I opened the box for the new computer I thought, “oh crap, there’s only the monitor!” He chuckled and explained the new “all in one” concept to me. Fine, okay.
It all seemed hunky-dory until he went looking for a driver to get the new PC to speak with my old, reliable printer. And couldn’t find one. Crap. No printer? It really annoys me to think I have to buy a new printer, too. The old one worked fine. It’s got like a $70 ink cartridge in there, too.
And then he told me the new PC, running Windows 8.1, didn’t come with Office Suite. No Outlook, so no email. No Word, so no word processor, aka fancy typewriter.
I handled this in my usual rational fashion by thanking and paying the man, deciding I’d spent way too much time on tech stuff that day already and going upstairs to join the missus and watch a Netflix movie.
When I woke up the next morning, early Sunday before dawn, it hit me. I still had a PC that spoke to my trusty old printer. I still had Outlook and Word on it, too. And I had the souped-up Ferrari for cruising the internet. I just didn’t have them all together.
So I hooked up the old PC to the printer again. Voila, email, word processor, and printer access! And I moved the fancy new PC over on the desk, so now I have ‘em both. Should work fine.
Until the next hassle of course, which arrived sooner than expected—more on that next.