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.