Big Blue

I have really enjoyed my Dell laptop for the last several years. It's a good workhorse, and I've logged many, many hours on it without any problems. The only complaint I've had is with the lid hinge, and that's mostly my own fault. I confess that I've accidentally knocked it off the coffee table a few times when the lid was open. That certainly wasn't good. It finally got to the point last fall where the lid suddenly refused to stay up by itself. It would either fall shut or flop all the way open. Well, that makes it pretty impossible to use, so my hubby went to the basement that evening and slapped together a quick fix for me.

Nothing fancy and quite heavy, but it worked OK. Since the hinge was snapped (and the plastic was broken) on both sides, I was worried about how long this was going to work without affecting the screen. The laptop is 3 years old, so it's at the age when other things could go wrong, too (including the motherboard).

Steve bought me an inexpensive 10" android tablet for Christmas. I really like it for my daily web reading, checking emails and traveling, and I know it has saved a lot of additional hours on my laptop. However, my laptop and keyboard is really a necessity for blogging, longer replies to emails, better photo editing and our church accounting. Steve has been telling me to find a good deal on a new laptop since before Christmas, but I'm a notorious tightwad (especially when it comes to spending money on myself). The fear of having no laptop at all eventually won me over. I looked and looked and studied and studied, and I finally found a deal I couldn't pass up. (I also made Steve promise to make this my early birthday present.)

I'm calling it Big Blue, as it has more system RAM and a larger hard drive than my old Dell, but it's actually thinner and lighter. The lid hinges also appear to have an improved design. I like a 15.6" laptop with a 10-key number pad on the keyboard to make entering numbers in accounting programs much faster. I just got Big Blue on Thursday afternoon and made a factory reinstall/system repair disk yesterday afternoon, so I'm still setting things up the way I want them and transferring files. I was used to Windows 7 on my old Dell, but I haven't found Windows 8.1 to be a problem at all. (Don't let it scare you. If you've ever used a tablet or smartphone, it's not difficult to figure out Windows 8.1.) My new toy is working great, and I'm looking forward to logging many blogging hours on Big Blue. 

All is well in the Keweenaw.