Computer Day

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It's been a strangely satisfying day. I had computer troubles. I was doing some housecleaning on my hard drive and inadvertently deleted all my e-mall accounts. I had to start again from square one and set up e-mail accounts for both gmail and my ISP. I finally got my gmail account sending me my e-mail again, but I got the wrong port number in my ISP account, and I'm too sick of messing with it to do a look-up to fix it.

When Apple decided to go 64-bit I was tickled to death. I been wanting me one of them thar devils for a long time. The problem was that my Mac Mini only had a 32-bit Intel chip, and nothing was gonna change that. I knew if I wanted to get hold of a 64-bit Snow Leopard Operating System I was gonna have to buy a new computer. After much agonizing to satify my miserliness I bought a new iMac with Snow Leopard installed.

Apple has a real good set-up to migrate your settings and other data from an older Mac to a newer one, and maybe vice-versa. My youngest brother, the Mac power user, reminded me of this, but I had already beat him to the punch by figuring out how to do it myself. It wasn't difficult to locate the software that made it happen. It's labeled Computer-to-Computer Migration Program or something equally as obvious.

I should have thought about what might happen if I migrated all my old settings to the new machine. I didn't. I migrated them anyway. My doing that was a rather inconvenient mistake I'm still paying for. The data and setting were from a 32-bit Operating System to a 64-bit Operating System. Too late now to do anything but reinstall from the DVD, and that would be a really big hassle because it would put everything back to a default setting for everything.

It took hours to get my rig back to acting like anything normal, but I removed a lot of old stuff that got migrated that ain't nothing but baggage. I downloaded new 64-bit upgrades for some critical software like the Onyx software program I use to do a lot of maintenance work. The software for my Logitech Anywhere mouse had been upgraded to 64-bit, and that allowed me to remove all the old Logitech stuff that showed up before I installed the upgrade.

That was particularly pleasurable for me to do. I located and deleted every Logitech file I had on my computer. There were eleven of them scattered about in different folders for various reasons. I didn't know which ones were needed to let my use the Anywhere mouse. So, I reacted in a truly classical pattern. I deleted them all and let God sort it out. '-)

Now, I know the only Logitech software I have on my computer is the right stuff for what I need Logitech for. It's a great mouse. I use it instead of the Magic Mouse that came with the iMac. The upgrade to 64-bit really helps an already excellent product.

I read some new today that saddened me in one way, and made me feel a little smug in another. Intel announced that they won't be putting no USB3 in their chipset that controls the motherboards that run Intel CPUs until possibly 2012. It was predicted this would happen in the last quarter of 2010. Nada. Ain't gwine happen.

Why does that matter? Why does that make a tinker's damn? Because I bought a new computer I couldn't afford because I somehow felt that the promise for ubiquitous USB3 by the end of 2010 was vaporware. You see, I had made a promise to myself that I wasn't gonna buy until Apple came out with USB3 and SATA3. But then, I somehow figured it was gonna be a long wait for reasons I didn't specifically understand.

I might have to wait a couple of years to get a new computer that had USB3 or SATA3, and right now they had a 64-bit operating system I'd been dying to get my hands on since the early 90's. Well, not dying for necessarily, but the idea that I might die while I was waiting for an indeterminate drop dead date to get a few features of unproven worth was ridiculous.

What my new iMac does have that makes up for it is room for 16 gigabytes of DRAM3. I've been waiting to see what the iPad was all about, and the fact that it's not a phone is a deal-breaker for me. What that means is that I can go ahead and invest the money I've been saving for months to buy 8 more gigabytes of DRAM to go with the 4 Gigabyte the iMac came with.

That will make 12 gigabytes of DRAM with a 3.06 gigabyte Intel CPU. I never had a computer with more than 512 Megabytes until last year when I upgraded to two gigabytes on my Mac Mini. That's all it would take on the Mini's 32-bit system and 32-bit Intel CPU. When I get that extra DRAM, then I can start saving to buy a voice recognition program that requires lots of DRAM. Yeah... right.

Well, I might need it. Rheumatoid arthritis is notorious for what it does to peoples ability to use their hands. I can get ready for that before it happens. As long as I can talk I can still communicate with a sensible voice recognition program. That is, if I still can remember my name by then. Shit happens. Thangs change.
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