Clare's upgrade

It was nice to wake up to sunshine, even if there were showers on and off later in the day. This morning's 'Thought for the Day by Tina Beattie was interesting, as it was a reflection on Sunday's episodes of 'Call the Midwife' and 'Line of Duty' which went out on BBC One in tandem. The former she said, highlighted compassion, while the latter highlighted justice, both core Christian values which all need to take to heart.

Late morning, I walked down to Tourotech, our local independent geek store before lunch and bought Clare a two year old refurbished Core i5 laptop with 8GB RAM and a 250GB SSD. It was already set up with a Windows 10 single user area, and a small assortment of free software, but Clare wanted to continue with Linux Mint so installing that was my next job. 

But first I drove her over the the University School of Optometry to get an adjustment made to her new specs. The installation only took twenty minutes. Copying her data from old too new device to two hours. The only thing I had trouble with was getting wi-fi to work, even after correctly installing and configuring the software. I stopped at six and completed my walk for the day later than usual, listening to the Archers on my phone while I was out. Today's episode was interesting as it was all about the christening of Alice's newborn - her chat with the Vicar and the grannies getting the christening party ready.

It turns out that wi-fi works if Secure Boot is switched off. There may be a workaround but I have yet to discover it. For the most part, the new laptop involves little or no new learning or changing of habits for Clare, and that's what counts. This machine has Mint's Mate desktop, and is quite pleasing to the eye as well as being familiar in its function.

If only Windows 10 was as easy to tailor consistently to one's own needs without forever swamping the user with annoying nags and notifications. Chromebooks are better still, but not as flexible as Linux, and you have to adapt to them, as customistion is only possible in a limited way. Interestingly Google didn't send me a whole load of security notifications when I set up Chrome Browser and Firefox for email purposes on Clare's new machine. Same operating system, from same I.P. address, but different hardware seems to have gone un-noticed.