Christopher L. Bennett's Blog, page 9

I have the power (strip)!

It took a while, but that new power strip with battery backup finally arrived. I ordered it largely out of the suspicion that my auto-reboot problem might be due to brief power dropouts, but since I haven’t had an auto-reboot in the nearly 2 weeks since I ordered it, I don’t think that’s the issue. Still, I had been concerned about this mini-PC not having battery backup like my laptop, so I’m glad to have the safeguard.

The instructions recommended letting the battery charge for 8 hours before plugging anything into it, which was probably unnecessary, but I didn’t feel up to unplugging everything yesterday, so I waited until this morning to do it.

The inclusion of the battery and, apparently, its cooling system makes the power strip surprisingly huge and heavy. Ironically, the power source is something like 3 times the size of the computer it’s powering!

Only the four outlets on the right have battery backup, while the four on the left are just surge-protected. I was hoping I could plug the computer, modem, monitor, and speakers into the battery side, but too many of them had those big transformer boxes and only the two outlets nearest the camera have enough space on the sides to accommodate them. So I had to plug the speakers in on the non-battery side, with the printer taking the fourth battery-side slot. I suppose it doesn’t matter, though; apparently the battery only provides about half an hour of power, enough to wrap up what you’re doing and shut down if there’s a blackout. So it’s not like I could keep watching a movie or something if the power went out. (And if I did need audio during that time for some reason, I could just unplug the speakers and plug in headphones.)

Before, I had eight different items plugged into two power strips: computer, monitor, modem, speakers, printer, USB hub, paper shredder wastebasket, and phone charger. I could only use seven of the outlets, but my phone charger cord has a detachable plug, so I just plugged it into the USB hub. Which means now my computer reads the phone as a device when I charge it, but somehow I can’t find its files in Windows 11’s bizarrely overcomplicated and repetitive directory tree. Though I was able to use the “Link to computer” function to upload the above photo from my phone to my PC.

The power source comes with a USB cable and supposedly has downloadable power management software from Amazon, I guess so the PC can read how much battery life is left or something. But looking over the Q&A section on Amazon gives me the impression that the software is either nonexistent or hard to find, and is optional in any case. So I decided not to bother. Ironically, the unused USB cable has the same type of connectors as the new printer cable I bought recently, and appears long enough to reach, so I wish I’d gotten this before I bought that printer cable. Although this cable is thinner, so maybe it’s not the right type somehow.

It looks a bit concerning having so many devices powered from the same wall outlet, but that outlet has reliably provided power to all those devices for quite a few years, so I guess it’s okay. (The other item plugged into the wall is my landline phone. I turn off my power strips for safety when I go on a trip, but leave the phone plugged in so it can take messages.)

It’s interesting that all my old power strips were white plastic with red power lights, but this is the negative of that, black plastic with a green power light. By the same token, all my newer electronics are black, but my old computer speakers are off-white. There seems to have been an inversion in the fashion for electronic devices. I wonder, why has black become the default color? If anything, I’d think white would be better because it absorbs less heat from outside and reduces the risk of overheating.

Quick computer situation update

Well, I may have overreacted about the computer situation last time. I haven’t had an unplanned reboot in the past 10 days. My cousin on Facebook suggested it might be an issue with the power-saving sleep settings, which I was skeptical of because the restarts had occurred earlier than I’d set the sleep mode to engage. But I realized he had a point — the restarts only happened when I was away from the computer for a while.

So I looked deeper into the settings, and I found that the hard disk was set to shut down after 45 minutes idle. The online sources I looked up didn’t agree on whether a solid state drive should or even can be shut down, but at least one thing suggested that it might cause problems. So I’m just guessing, but maybe the auto-shutdown causes some kind of SSD glitch that forces a reboot.

I couldn’t figure out how to set the drive shutdown to “never,” but I set it for 300 minutes, long enough that it’s unlikely to kick in. I also realized that it was unwise for me to get out of the habit of putting my computer in sleep mode when I went out. My laptop was so slow to start up and shut down that I guess I was too impatient to wait for it, even in sleep mode, but this computer is so fast that there’s no reason not to let it sleep. So I’ve started to get back into that habit.

Of course, I can’t be sure any of this has fixed the problem, or that I was even correct about the problem. You can’t prove a negative. But so far, signs are encouraging.

More computer hassles

Two days ago, my new computer spontaneously rebooted while I was out for a walk again, even though the settings menu still says it’s set not to reboot during active hours. When I signed in, it gave me a “Let’s finish setting up” startup screen and I was afraid it had somehow wiped out all my data and reset to day one. It turned out all my stuff is still there, so I don’t know why it thought I was back to setup. It had been 4 weeks to the day since I got it, so maybe it was set to prompt me to finish setup that I’d skipped earlier, or something?

(Anyway, it gave me the option to connect the PC to my phone again, and I finally successfully linked them, though I’m not sure I’ll have much use for the function.)

It occurred to me the next day to check the event log for the time of the reboot, and it seems there was an unexpected shutdown, not an auto-update as I assumed. It offered no explanation for the shutdown, but suggested that there could have been a power interruption or that there’s some kind of a hardware fault. I’d hate to have to replace the PC so soon and go to the trouble of setting up another with my software.

Split-second power interruptions are actually something that happens in this apartment from time to time, which wouldn’t have been an issue with my laptop, since it had a battery. I decided that, since my power strip is really old, I should replace it on general principles, so I’ve ordered a new one that includes battery backup. Hopefully that will solve the problem, and if not, well, it’s still probably a good idea to have it.

Meanwhile, I followed online advice to go into the advanced settings and disable the thing that auto-reboots after a system failure. That may have been a mistake. I came back to the computer after some time reading a book and found the screen blank, and nothing I did with the keyboard would get it to light up again, although the power-on light on the mini-PC was lit. Pushing the power button on the mini-PC didn’t do anything, so I had to unplug it to restart. (Well, I didn’t try unplugging the keyboard from the PC first, so I don’t know if that would’ve worked.) Needless to say, I’ve re-enabled the auto-reboots. But I’m worried that this happened twice in as many days.

The system log in the event viewer doesn’t show any sign of a system failure in the time window in question. The only notation was one from when I rebooted, saying “The previous system shutdown at 6:41:31 PM on ‎8/‎24/‎2023 was unexpected.”

The fact that it can’t tell me anything except “shutdown unexpected” suggests the cause may be external. So I’m hoping this is due to some power supply problem that the new battery-backup power strip will fix. But if that were the case, why didn’t it just shut down, like it did when I unplugged it? Also, why does this only happen when I’m away from the computer for a time? The timing is wrong for it to be a sleep mode thing, and it only happens occasionally.

I still haven’t figured out how to get the printer to work, by the way. I’ve been busy finishing a novel manuscript.

On top of everything else, I found out this morning that the window for returning the thing to Amazon expired yesterday. If the power strip doesn’t fix things, or if the problems worsen, I may have to contact the manufacturer’s customer service. But it’s a small company based in Hong Kong and I had a hard time even finding an address. Alternatively, I could find a local repair shop to take it to. There are two nearby that I can find, but the nearer one is a place whose service I haven’t been too happy with in the past.

If the worst happens and I have to replace it, I may just go for a new laptop after all. The main reasons I wanted a desktop PC were price, the convenience of not having to open the lid to turn it on, and the option of having an optical drive, but I ended up having to buy an outboard optical drive anyway, then returned it when it stopped working.

Anyway, I really hope the power strip fixes the problem. I don’t like being preoccupied with this when I’m trying to wrap up the manuscript of Arachne’s Legacy.

As always, I welcome informed suggestions and input.

Still no printer

Well, I tried uninstalling all my drivers from the printer’s CD, removing the printer from Devices, and starting over from scratch. I hooked up the printer and turned it on, and Windows detected it and auto-installed a Canon Inkjet Print Utility, which seemed promising. But then the utility gave me the same “A driver used by this application is not installed” error message without specifying which driver. I went to the support site it recommended, the one from which I’d previously tried downloading a more up-to-date driver. This time I went through the help chat dialog box, and it pointed me to a different download that turned out to be the exact same thing from the CD, complete with antiquated graphics.

I tried it anyway, what the heck. It told me it had to uninstall a previous version of the driver — probably the newer one I’d tried before, ironically — and required me to reboot. When I rebooted, the utility opened and gave me the same missing-driver error message, and the installation didn’t resume. I gave up for a while, then realized maybe I needed to try running the installer again. I did, and it seemed to go smoothly, albeit slowly.

But then, when I tried to get it to recognize the printer, the same thing as before happened: it initially claimed to have detected the printer, spent several minutes claiming to be completing the installation, then said the printer wasn’t detected, was I sure it was plugged in? So I tried moving the USB cable (the new one I bought last week) from the hub plugged into the back to an open port in the front, thinking it might be a faster, cleaner connection. It did seem to be faster — in that it didn’t take nearly as long to tell me it couldn’t detect the printer.

Argh.

Just to make sure, I got out my laptop, and once it had very slowly booted up, I tried printing something from it. And it worked fine, with no problems (except that I accidentally told it to print a 12-page document that I thought was one page, and it was 6 pages in before I found the control to cancel it).

So: The printer isn’t the problem. The cable isn’t the problem. The drivers installed just fine. Yet I still can’t get the new computer to detect the printer. What else could be going on?

Anyway, I did manage to get a few more things done. The free antivirus program I’d tried, based on a positive review online, stopped providing full service after a week and nearly forced me to upgrade to the paid version before I figured out how to get out of it, so I decided to uninstall it and go back to my usual Avast, which further research showed is still one of the top-rated programs. I also discovered that Win 11 doesn’t put a link for the Task Manager in the tray, so I found out how to open it, then pinned it to the taskbar while it was open. Also, while I had my laptop on, I transferred over my music and audio library, which I’d neglected to do the first time.

Meanwhile, it occurred to me that I hadn’t tried plugging in my webcam (which I usually leave unplugged so nobody can hack into it or something). When I did, there was no auto-download of the software, though the computer did recognize the device and showed me a live feed from it in the settings menu. I found the manual and went to the download site it listed, but the software there apparently only supports up to Windows 10. I asked in live chat if that software might work in compatibility mode, and the support person said it might work, so I decided to try it. But all it gives me is a live image from the camera. There’s no recording software like there was for the older version.

Well, my webcam is very old and low-resolution anyway. Maybe this is an incentive to buy a newer one. It looks like I can get a cheap one for under 20 bucks. I’ll think about it, if I need one. I might just use my phone camera if I need to make a Zoom call or record a video.

Hmm, it’s probably worth checking if the printer’s website has chat support. But I’ve done enough computer stuff for today.

New computer growing pains

My tiny new computer is mostly working well, but there are a few significant issues.

I still can’t get the PC to detect the printer. I tried moving the printer cable to other USB ports, with no luck. I’ve looked online for suggestions, and the next thing to try is to uninstall the drivers and try again. I’m thinking maybe the old drivers on the printer’s CD might be glitching with Win 11, so it might help to get rid of them and retry installing the more up-to-date drivers downloaded from the manufacturer’s site.

Relatedly, the outboard CD/DVD drive I bought seems to be busted already. It worked the first day, but ever since, it just tries and fails to read the disk, making a regular brief scraping noise between silences. I tried it in another port, again, with no result. The “eject hardware” icon in the taskbar tray periodically appears for a split-second and vanishes. Unless someone reading this recognizes the issue and can recommend an easy fix, I think I’ll have to return or exchange it. I’m starting to wonder how necessary it is to have one; I could just use the one in my laptop if I need one.

The PC rebooted itself again while I was out for a walk this morning. My update history shows that the last update check was while I was out, and that a security update was installed today, so I suppose it must have automatically rebooted when it installed the update. I looked into the update settings and found a setting for the “active hours” during which it wouldn’t auto-reboot, which defaulted to 8 AM to 5 PM. That would explain this morning’s reboot, but not the late-morning one five days ago. But that could’ve been an effect of a lingering update pending from the day before. Anyway, I widened the active hours to reflect my schedule. I also found a setting that automatically saves and restarts my open programs when the PC restarts, so hopefully that will protect my apps from forced shutdowns.

A minor issue: the cooling fan platform never turns off, even when the PC is off. I thought it turned off when the laptop powered down, but I’m not certain, because the laptop covered the whole thing, so its sound wasn’t as audible. At first, I thought it was because I had the fan plugged into the USB hub, which is independently powered. So I moved things around to put it directly into the PC. (Its USB plug is designed to nest around another USB plug so you don’t lose a port.) But it still stays on permanently, which is an unnecessary power expenditure. Not sure there’s anything I can do about that.

Advice and input welcome.

I bought that new computer…

I went ahead and bought that miniature desktop PC I talked about several posts ago. I’ve spent the past couple of days setting it up and getting the hang of it.

On the day it was delivered, the Amazon tracking thing said it was due by 8 PM, so I was surprised when I checked again around lunchtime and saw that it had already been delivered, without my being notified. I was surprised by how small the package containing the PC, CD/DVD drive, and VGA-to-HDMI adapter was. There was basically no padding at all, just a thick brown paper sack holding a couple of boxes and a plastic envelope, and the boxes hugged their contents tightly. But the contents were intact.

Here it is, resting on top of my laptop’s cooling-fan platform. (Flash photography reveals that my attempt to clean the dust off was much less successful than I’d hoped.) That should give an idea of how tiny the thing is, smaller in footprint than a CD case. I initially tried it without the fan platform, thinking I could keep that with the laptop when I went out with it, but the mini-PC feels like it runs hotter than advertised, so I put the platform back after the first day. I also decided I’d only plug the optical drive when I needed it, so it wouldn’t block the airflow.

As it happens, those metal racks you see there were set up for my last desktop PC that I had until 2011, a “small form factor” device that was huge compared to this, and that ran pretty hot, needing the ventilation the racks provided. Since it broke down, I’ve relied solely on laptops in its place, keeping them on the top rack (the power strips are on the lower rack) and hooking the desktop keyboard, monitor, etc. up to it. It’s a reasonable place to keep the mini-PC too, out of the way but easy to reach. I’ve also been able to set the racks farther back under the desk than before, now that I no longer have to open the laptop lid and reach under it to the rear corner to hit the power button. The two USB slots on the front are also helpful; with my most recent laptop, all the USB slots were on the left side, the one facing inward. I had to use the USB hub you can see in the back there behind the yellow cable, but placed further forward and twist-tied/taped to the rack to keep it usefully positioned. The one minor annoyance is that the speaker jack is on the front, so it doesn’t look as neat as I would like. I guess that’s for the convenience of headphone users?

Anyway, setting up Windows and my desired software went mostly pretty smoothly, since the solid-state drive works much faster than a hard disk. Although my download speed is still limited by my building’s copper phone lines. The two things that took longest were transferring my files from my laptop over network wifi (I should’ve used my thumb-drive backup, but I didn’t want to miss anything I might’ve left off it) and downloading Windows updates.

If anything, videos now seem to need longer to load before they play, and I had more lag watching today’s Star Trek: Strange New Worlds than usual, though Paramount+ is always laggy for me. But the image quality is better, in some cases much better.

I have hit a couple of setbacks. One, I was hoping I’d be able to reactivate my Microsoft Office account now that I have Windows 11. Since Office stopped working on Windows 7, I’ve been using the shareware LibreOffice suite, which mostly works just as well and has a couple of features I like better, but it would’ve been good to have the more standard alternative back. But it turns out it won’t let me just resume my past service; I’d have to upgrade to their Office 365 thing that they charge an annual subscription fee for, instead of the one-time purchase price that they used to charge. So I figured, the hell with that, I’ll just stick with LibreOffice, which didn’t cost a thing. If I really need Office for something, I can just use the free online version. (Although it took me a couple of days to figure out how to get this new install of LibreOffice to do smart quotation marks. I forgot I needed to turn on “Autocorrect While Typing.”)

The bigger problem is that I can’t get the new PC to detect my printer, an older model that needs a cable connection. At first, I thought I was wise to buy an external optical drive, which I could use to install the software from the disc that came with the printer. But then that software didn’t work. So I went online and found the drivers there, but I couldn’t get those to work either. In both cases, I was told that the computer couldn’t detect the printer. My cousin-in-law on Facebook mentioned that the PC’s built-in generic drivers should work; I didn’t even think to try them. But they wouldn’t read the printer either. All I got when I tried to print a document was a “save output as” dialog.

I figured maybe it was a problem with the connection I was using; since the supplied printer cable was too short to reach my computer, I had it plugged into an old, slow USB hub with a long cord. So I went out yesterday to shop for a new USB hub. Neither the local Target nor the university bookstore had a hub with a long enough cord. But at the bookstore, I began to realize that one of the cables they had might have the right connector to fit the printer and let me go directly from it to the PC. But I wasn’t sure it was the right type, and the clerk told me it was unreturnable if I opened it. But I remembered seeing a similar one at Target, so I went back there, and they told me theirs was returnable, so I bought it. And it fit the printer and reached the PC, as I’d hoped. But I still can’t detect the printer.

I tried installing updates overnight, but this morning, the printer software that loaded on startup still couldn’t find the printer. I’m wondering if I should uninstall it all and start over, but I’m not sure how to do that and make sure I get it all. And I decided not to worry about it today. I don’t need the printer often, and if I do need to print something, I still have my laptop.

In fact, I still have my past three laptops, and as far as I know, they all still work. I only stopped using them when they got too outdated, too slow and low in power to keep up with progress. I keep them around just in case, because there’s at least one older program I used to use that won’t run on anything later than Windows Vista (even Win 11’s compatibility troubleshooter couldn’t crack it), and I might want to use it again sometime. Still, it feels wasteful to keep replacing old computers that still technically function. Maybe sometime I should donate the older two to some charity or other, though I wonder if the oldest one is too vintage even for that.

Anyway, one other oddity is that when I returned from shopping yesterday, I found the PC had rebooted itself for some reason. Apparently Win 11 has a problem with spontaneously rebooting, which I hope won’t be a serious issue. I guess it’s not too bad a problem, though. My e-mail client always checks its databases for corruption after a forced shutdown, which took forever on my old computer, but goes much faster on this one, so it’s less of a nuisance. I used to prefer hibernating to rebooting, since my laptop takes forever to boot up or shut down. But this one does both within seconds.

I’m finding that adjusting from Win 7 to Win 11 isn’t too hard. I miss having text labels on the taskbar icons, though. I found an online tutorial for how to change that, but it relies on adjusting a “Taskbar Behaviors” option that doesn’t exist in my version of Win 11. But I’m adjusting pretty quickly. One thing I quite like is having a built-in weather widget in the taskbar. There’s an automatic news feed pop-up there too, like in my phone, and I’ve already had to block updates from some disreputable “news” sources.

Apparently there are ways to connect Windows to my Android phone and use the same apps, but I haven’t looked into that yet. Not sure what I’d need it for.

Anyway, I really should get back to writing. I tried to do that today, but I got sidetracked writing this post. So I guess I should wrap up here.

GUARDIAN ANGEL concludes on Patreon with Chapter 5!

The concluding chapter of my Troubleshooter serial Guardian Angel is now out on my Patreon’s $10 Original Fiction tier. If you subscribe now for just one month, you can binge the entire serial along with my other original fiction, TV/media reviews, and (if you go for the $12 tier) behind-the-scenes notes and annotations. In the process, you can help me make up a little of the very high cost of my recent car repairs, and the more modest cost of the new computer I’ve just bought.

Here’s the index of the whole thing:

Chapter 1: “The Angel and the Panther”: Available to all Patreon subscribers from $1 up. (Annotations)Chapter 2: “The Innocent Assassin”: Ch. 2-5 available at the $10 Fiction tier. (Annotations)Chapter 3: “No Other Colors Without the Blues” (Annotations)Chapter 4: “How Do You Live?” (Annotations)Chapter 5: “Battle Angel Hikari” (Annotations)

In the shocking final chapter, Dark Tenshi enters the stage! Can Bast survive the final showdown and bring Kari back to her senses?

Grocery pickup mixup

Well, it finally happened. Every time I order my groceries online and pick them up at curbside, I hope the clerks don’t mix up my order with someone else’s. That’s not entirely paranoid, since one time a few years ago, not long after I started doing curbside pickup during the pandemic, a clerk came within moments of putting my order in someone else’s car before they caught on.

Anyway, what happened today wasn’t nearly as drastic. I asked the clerk to load things into the back seat, since it’s cooler than the trunk on this hot day, and I was able to recognize some of my ordered items in the plastic bags she loaded in. But on getting home, I discovered that the paper bag of frozen items contained things I didn’t order. And when I got up to my kitchen and did an inventory against my order, I confirmed that my own frozen items were missing, as were the bottled fruit juices I’d ordered. I figured the clerks must have grabbed the frozen bag from the order next to mine by mistake, or something.

So I went right back to the store with the misallocated bag of frozen foods, uneasy at having to wait in line nearly 10 minutes at the customer service desk while the stuff thawed, since heaven forbid any business today should have more than one clerk working at a desk with three service windows. (Three of the items were bags of vegetables, but one was breaded chicken.) Anyway, when I explained to the service person that the items in the bag were not substitutions but completely unrelated items, she called out the young woman that I recognized as the person who brought the groceries to my car.

I explained the situation, and the pickup clerk led me back to the mysterious “Employees Only” zone behind the glass doors that the pickup clerks always come out of. (Being me, I made sure to double-check with the clerk that I was allowed in there, not being an employee. It always makes me uncomfortable to defy a sign.) I’ve always wondered what was on the other side of those doors, and I’m not sure if it was smaller or larger than I imagined. It’s a room large enough to hold a row of shelves containing the waiting orders in blue plastic baskets, plus some pallets holding dozens more blue baskets, with a row of freezers along one wall where they keep the frozen items in the orders — surprising me, since I’d read once on the website that they didn’t pick out the frozen items until you let them know you were on the way. Maybe the freezers were a later addition? Anyway, there was a screened-off sort of mini-warehousey space above the freezers with several more pallets stacked high with blue baskets.

To the right of the big glass doors was a counter with a checkout scanner and a computer to track the orders, and the clerk checked on my order and confirmed what I should’ve gotten instead. Going back into the freezers, she found that my frozen items were still there — but somehow they were in the wrong bag, one slated for a pickup 2 hours later than mine, while the incorrect items were in the bag whose order number matched mine. So the clerk didn’t carelessly grab the wrong bag; she took the right bag, but somehow the wrong items were in it. That actually kind of reassures me about the risk of mixups, because this mixup didn’t happen in a simple, obvious way, but through some deeper error that’s harder to account for. The system is actually pretty well-designed to make sure people get the right bags. Although hopefully after this the clerks will make more of an effort to double-check the contents of those bags first.

It also remains a mystery how I didn’t get my fruit juices, but the clerk went and picked them up for me, and I thanked her for her efforts in sorting it out, and for giving me a peek behind the curtain. I’m glad to hear that the order that got mixed up with mine (presumably) was one that hadn’t been picked up yet, so presumably those people will get the right items. Hopefully they weren’t out of the freezer long enough to thaw.

Looking for a new computer

I’ve been thinking for a while now that I need a new computer. I’m still using a Windows 7 laptop which is increasingly unsupported by modern software; a while back, Word stopped working for me and I had to switch to the free LibreOffice software. Also, my laptop has gotten very slow and seems to have inadequate memory to run more than a few programs at once. And sometimes it overheats when I watch videos and shuts down to avoid damage. This is pretty rare, and happens less since I got a cooling-fan platform, but it happened last Friday while I was watching the new Ultraman Blazar episode livestreaming on YouTube, only the second time it’s happened on that site. (Something to do with the livestream, I would guess, though it’s never happened with Ultraman before.)

So I started looking around online for new laptops, but the ones available these days don’t seem to have many port types available. I hook my current laptop into my desktop keyboard, monitor, etc., and it takes several USB ports, a VGA port for the monitor, and an ethernet cable to my modem as a backup in case the wifi fails. I’m also reluctant to give up having a DVD-RW drive.

But yesterday it occurred to me — if laptops don’t have what I want, do they still make desktop computers? So I looked into that, and I found there are a lot of very small ones these days that would easily fit on the rack where I keep my laptop now. The ones that include DVD drives are much bigger, too big for the rack, but I looked into outboard DVD drives, and they’re actually quite inexpensive.

I think this option makes sense. I used to have both a small form factor desktop PC and a laptop. (The wire rack I have was set up specifically to give ventilation to the desktop, which ran pretty hot.) This was for the sake of redundancy in case one computer failed, and I used the laptop mainly for writing at places other than my desk — other parts of the apartment, my balcony, one of the libraries or buildings on the nearby campus. I found it helpful to write in different places because it helped stimulate my creativity and made it easier to avoid the distractions of browsing. When my desktop PC failed, I couldn’t afford the luxury of two computers anymore, so I adopted my current practice of using my laptop as a desktop unit — which means I rarely use the laptop anywhere else anymore, because of the hassle of unplugging everything. And I feel that’s impeded my creative output.

I mean, granted, ideally I could use a better laptop than this one. But as long as it still works, it makes sense to keep it and use it mainly for writing, while getting a new desktop PC as my main device. Despite my initial problems with defective hard drives, the laptop has been mostly reliable for the past six years, so I might as well keep it around.

I’ve found a mini-PC that looks reasonably good. Amazon describes it as a “Mini PC Intel 11th Gen N5105(Up to 2.9GHz) Intel UHD Graphics Mini Office Computer, 16GB RAM DDR4 512GB NVMe SSD Windows 11 Pro Micro Desktop pc, 2xHDMI and USB-C Triple 4K@60Hz Outputs.” I’m not sure what all that means, but that’s four times as much RAM as I currently have, and more than twice the hard drive size. My current laptop is 2.4 GHz, and both computers have 64-bit operating systems, so I guess it’s at least as good? Ironically, this desktop computer is much smaller than my laptop, less than 5 inches on a side.

I understand that an SSD is a solid-state hard drive using flash memory, which I gather is much faster and more stable than the old-style spinning hard disk my laptop has. I’ve been wanting to upgrade to one of those. Although I’m a bit confused, because the specs on Amazon mention “Hard Drive Rotational Speed: 2500.” But all the reviews confirm it’s an SSD, which has no moving parts. Maybe that entry is just a leftover line in the template that someone forgot to delete?

The reviews are not numerous, but they’re all 5-star, saying it’s powerful, fast, and quiet, doesn’t overheat, and can “play 4K media without issues.” It seems very good for my needs, and it’s relatively inexpensive (there’s even a coupon). I would need to buy a VGA adapter to hook up my monitor, though; it looks like I could get adapters for either HDMI or USB, and I’m wondering which is better.

My main concern is compatibility. I use a lot of older programs, and one of the reviews suggests that Windows 11 Pro might not be able to run them all. I’m wondering what my options are if that happens. Is there some kind of emulator program for older operating systems?

Shore Leave/car crisis postscript, hopefully the last one

I took my car in to the garage this morning, though my jumpstarter pack didn’t work at first. I think I didn’t have it fully charged, or maybe it’s not retaining a charge as well as it used to and needs replacing. I finally got the car started, though, and took it in. It didn’t take them long to determine the battery had a bad cell and needed replacing; fortunately it was still under warranty, so it was free.

Still, this is the third battery change in five years. The problem is that I just don’t drive often enough, which is bad for the battery. The garage guy suggested a battery tender, which is a thingy you plug into a wall jack that keeps the battery’s charge topped up. But since I park in an apartment lot rather than a private garage, I don’t have that option. He recommends I at least start the engine every couple of days. I’m wondering if I could get by with, say, a weekly drive to Burnet Woods, which would be nearly a 4-mile round trip.

On the plus side, after picking up my car today, I finally managed to adjust the seat to its optimal position on the first try. I think.

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Reprinting from Facebook:

In my Shore Leave post, I forgot to mention the unnerving moment on the freeway Sunday afternoon when I barely avoided running over a turtle that was still early in a very slow crossing of the 2-lane roadway. By the time I spotted the fairly small turtle, I didn’t have time to do anything but hope I’d miss it, and fortunately I did. I hope by some miracle the turtle managed to make it across safely — or at least came to its senses and turned back.

Although I had another close call on my trip out on Thursday. leaving a toll plaza, when an inattentive driver on my right suddenly swerved left out of an exit lane I thought they were committed to taking but had apparently entered by mistake, swerving back out at the last moment and not paying attention to what was on their left. I started to dodge left, but there was a car on that side of me and I was trapped between them. As with the turtle, I avoided getting sandwiched more by lucky timing than anything else.