Computer trouble is so much fun! Not really. I tried all afternoon on Monday to get my laptop to function reliably. It would lock up randomly and at times I had to manually shut it down and reboot. I couldn’t save anything.

Yesterday, after talking to my friends and former colleagues, Khaldoon Tufail and Bob Clogg, I tried a few other approaches. I ran malware software to try to detect if that was the problem. The thing is, it couldn’t complete the scan before locking up. I tried over and over again. Then I ran a hardware diagnostic and came up with a laundry list of faults in the memory and motherboard. The laptop I’ve been using is an inexpensive HP Pavillion G6. These are prone to overheat and have known issues with the cooling fan. I’ve been using mine on a laptop cooler to control the heat. Apparently, the heat won.

Khaldoon does part-time work for Best Buy in their customer service department. He knows which products get returned and which ones people seem satisfied with. After consulting with him, I went to Best Buy. I had a few notebook PCs in mind. I ended up with a new ASUS notebook. It has a 15.5″ touch screen, so it operates like a normal laptop with a keyboard or you can use it like a tablet. The screen rotates completely around the backside, so you can set it on a counter, keyboard down, and use it like a tablet.

The features that sold me on it were the performance and the aluminum shell – not plastic like most laptops. It has 8GB of RAM, a 1TB hard drive and the processor is an Intel Core i5. This new laptop has way more power and speed than my old HP. It runs cool. But, it also cost twice as much. Oh well, you get what you pay for.

I’m working on file transfers (when I can get the old one to transfer a file!) and set-up. I’m transferring files with a 32GB thumb drive. It’s hard to believe that thumb drives hold up to 64GB nowadays. The 32GB drive cost me $16. Unbelievable how cheap memory has become.

We have a busy schedule today, so I don’t know much of the set-up I’ll accomplish. I’ll post more when time allows.