For the last few days I have been wrestling with technology. My PC died over the weekend and I spent a couple of days trying to resuscitate it, then a few days deciding what to replace it with. I finally forked out on a new one on Tuesday when trying to use the laptop annoyed me too much, and since then I have been taking my time setting it all up. I’m sure it would all be a lot easier if I had access to the old hard drive and could make use of te various utilities Windows has for exporting and transferring files and settings.

As it is I reloaded all the data from an external hard drive (always keep a copy!) while re-installing software from scratch. The anti-virus was first, then Firefox, Chrome, Spotify, Last.FM, iTunes and PhotoFiltre to download. MS Office was next, which involved downloading and some calls to the MS customer support number to get itactivated. PaintShop Pro and Photoshop Elements were next and surprisingly that was no problem – I have always found Adobe to be fussy about licence keys .

It was all a bit slow, but then thre was a lot of data transfer going on, followed by iTunes and Windows Media Player searching for podcasts and music files respectively and updating their libraries. Actually the WMP library update took forever.

Finally I set up email accounts on Outlook and was quite pleased to find not nearly as much spam as I was expecting.

I’ve got the printer drivers set up but still need to install the software from the Flip and Sony Reader and then whatever other bits and pieces I can think of. For old times’ sake I shall reinstall some of the iRiver software since the trusty old HP120 does still work.

I supppose that now everything is up and running again I should think about actually doing some work before I get tempted to install Age of Empires and Rise of Nations. I’m looking forward to the possibilities of photo editing with two monitors at my disposal.