spring cleaning

   

I spent this morning cleaning and polishing my new car. I say new, actually I have had it for six weeks but this is the first time I have given it serious attention. Odd behaviour from one who normally scrubs and wipes until all around him is antiseptically clean and gleaming like a mirror.

There is a good reason for this lax attitude. The weather. I drove my new, one-year-old Hyundai Elantra home from the dealership in snow flurries and have since swept off snow and scraped off ice every day until quite recently. This morning dawned sunny and bright so I drove through the car wash (an outrageous extravagance I know but apartment living doesn't easily lend itself to car washing).

I then polished every square centimetre, including under the bonnet and around all door reveals and hinges. All interior glass received Windex treatment and every plastic nook and cranny of the dashboard, cockpit cleaner. I vacuumed the carpets and took the floor mats into the laundry room for scrubbing. In the noon sunshine it looked pretty good.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My Dell XPS16 has been showing signs of age. It's four years old and still nicely spec'd but definitely suffering from too many files and programmes and not enough hard drive. I keep deleting my old restore points to create space.

I started looking around for a replacement some months ago and by the time I was ready to make a decision, Windows 8 was behind almost all new systems. Research had revealed that this was more akin to a mobile phone set-up with 'apps' being the order of the day. As a staunch traditionalist I still remember Windows 3, and having suffered the vicissitudes of Millennium, XP and Vista, I wanted to hang onto some familiarity. Every day my choices grew less as Microsoft phased out Windows 7.

I ended up switching from Dell to Asus and bought a nineteen inch hi-definition laptop with Blu-ray, Bluetooth and a backpack! It has 12GB of RAM and 1.5TB hard drive. Oh and yes, Windows 7. The last batch before it was phased out.

I'm pleased with it. The generous RAM means I can have several complex applications open simultaneously. It took a few days to install the software I use, load all 15,000 photos, 25,000 mp3 files, my Genealogy files and images, and a slew of Word and Excel documents. There have been a couple of minor issues which I was able to resolve. In particular, video 'tearing' was very evident during fast action but I tracked that down to using the conventional Windows desktop instead of one of the preferred 'Aero' themes. Using 'Aero' brings additional resources from the NVidia graphics card into play, such that video is now rendered smoothly.

So, the Dell has been relegated to the role of browser (and occasional kids' plaything!) The Asus is now the system of choice for writing, genealogy, photo and music.