Anybody can give somebody a new computer. As long as your credit card will bear the purchase price you can offer up a box from PC World or Amazon or where you will, nicely wrapped if you like. The most precious part of the gift is the follow-up, getting the recipient's data off their old computer and safely installed on their new one.
It took most of the day to download all the files from my ancient laptop on to a memory stick. The Systems Administrator wasn't actually standing over the machine for the entire time, and the process took so long partly because it ground to a halt each time the download ran into a problem, and had to wait until the SA came and told it what to do next. I didn't dare touch anything. It also took that long because the old machine was running at literally (in the true Radio 4 sense) two per cent of the speed of the new one.
I'm beginning to think that I ran it to the wire insisting on waiting until my birthday for the upgrade. Some of the files are so corrupted that I can't work out what they originally were, and the SA can't even tell me what type of file they used to be. Word, Excel, jpeg, Adobe? The description in the file manager just says File. Fortunately all the important ones I use regularly seem intact, though the new laptop won't actually run my income tax spreadsheet, and the SA is going to have to upgrade the machine to the current version of Excel. Upgrade me too, since I'm still using the 2000 version and I gather things have changed a bit, but as I said to the SA, if I've got to learn to use a different version I might as well go on to the current one rather than upgrading to one that's only nine years out of date instead of fifteen.
I don't know how people manage who haven't married their help desk. Learn more themselves about how computers work, I suppose, or ask their children, or a friend. Or take a chance on the little repair shop in the village being run by an honest geek and not a crook who will steal their data. Or refuse to have a computer and stick to using a mobile, or at a pinch a tablet. The Treasurer of my music society keeps the accounts in a beautiful red hardback accounts book. But I find Excel a fabulously useful way of keeping data and performing basic computations. From the beekeepers' accounts to my own finances to my long list of all the things I've ever planted in the garden and where, a spreadsheet is my go-to solution. What I've bought for who for Christmas, gardens and museums to visit while we're on holiday, lists of bulb orders arranged by season and supplier, films that reviewed well to borrow from Lovefilm, what art exhibitions are on where and when they close, it all goes on Exel. Plus Word for letters, house sitting instructions, lecture notes. I am a Microsoft Office junkie and the phone is no substitute.
We will continue with the great setting up of the new computer tomorrow, and the SA is going to teach me how to save things to the cloud. While aware of the need to make back-ups in case of laptop disaster, faced with the discipline of finding a suitable memory stick and downloading my data, making regular copies is a practice I've honoured better in the breach than the observance. Pressing a button and sending work off to the cloud would be much easier (and less clunky than the emergency method of attaching the document to an email and sending it to yourself). Besides, the SA warned me that the new computer will want to save things there anyway, so I had better know where to look for my data, if I suddenly can't find it on the computer's own drives.
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