My old PC, an HP all-in-one with a 34″ curved screen, was showing signs of imminent failure. Microsoft Blue Screens of Death started happening with WHE (Windows Hardware Error) codes, and the screen started to get intermittent yellow lines on it, from top to bottom, and none of that looked good. The old girl had to have been at least seven years old and didn’t really owe me anything, so I thought I’d pension her off before she turned up her digital toes. It’s a bit sad because I’d done some good upgrades, including replacing the original 150GB Solid State Drive (SSD), that was supposed to be the boot drive with a 1TB upgrade, and I swapped out the old 1Tb mechanical hard disk for a 1Tb SSD. That upgrade on the mechanical hard drive was a bit of disaster because I managed to damage the LCD screen when putting it all back together, and lost an inch of visible screen on the left side, and suffered a growing dark stain over about a third of the bottom of the left-hand side of the screen. It was still useable, especially as the screen was so big, but the problem was getting worse.

The HP all-in-one cost me an arm and a leg when I bought it, and right now I don’t have the cash to lay out for a similar system, so I downsized. Now it’s an HP all-in-one with a 27″ screen, but with a bit more memory and slightly faster processors than the old PC. Happily, it cost less than one third of the old machine, which pleased me greatly. My needs are fewer these days, so I’m quite content with the downgrade. Anyway, I can see my desk again, now.

Buying a new PC is quite easy. I shopped around, checked out a few early Black Friday deals and settled on the new HP, direct from HP Canada. I managed to get nearly $700 off the list price, so that was the clincher. I ordered it on the Tuesday night, and I had it in my grubby little hands on Friday afternoon, which was pretty much Amazon speed. Alarmingly, HP Canada proudly boasts Canadapost and Purolator as its partners, which was a quite concerning given that Canadapost is on strike right now. However, it didn’t appear that Purolator was involved in the strike, even though it’s the parcels arm of Canadapost, and I was mightily relieved to see the Purolator van pull up outside my house.

The packaging of the computer was quite ingenious, and the way it was all fitted into the box, meant that because I followed the instructions properly, I didn’t have to handle the screen while getting it out from all the padding. Take it from one who has manhandled a 65″ thin screen TV onto a wall, that’s a real bonus. The keyboard and mouse were both wired models, actually perfect for my needs, and battery-free, but they are very cheap and cheerful, so it hasn’t taken me long to replace those with better models that I had knocking around at home.

Then I began the set up process. Years ago when I was in IT support, I installed hundreds of software packages onto hundreds of PCs, and all using boxes full of floppy disks. It was a slow and painful business, and done at a time when very few PCs had an Internet connection, or even a Local Area Network. Compuserve was our friend back then, but only on the PC that had a modem and telephone line attached. Today, all I had to do was plug a network cable into the back of the PC and let it do its thing. The PC came with Windows 11 pre-loaded, but that all has to be updated and tweaked, but even then I had the thing working within a few minutes and was downloading all the paid software I have collected over the years. I could have cloned the boot disk from my old machine as it was the same size, but doing it the long way, by treating it as a first-time set up, I’ve been able to leave things out and make a few adjustments. A clean start is a good start, even if it takes a little longer.

Early impressions of the new PC are good. The screen resolution isn’t as tight as I’d like, and I could probably tighten it up a little, but I’ll leave it as it is because I’m sure to get used to it. I did hang a second monitor from the PC, and marvelled at how easy it is to do these days with an HDMI cable and Windows 11. The boot up is fast, and the response is good, although as so much is done through the Internet these days, it’s as much about having a decent connection as it is about the speed of the computer. I am slowly switching off all the little things that Windows likes to add, the bells and whistles as it were, that I have no need for. The very first thing I did was revert the right-click context menus to the Windows 10 version. The newer iteration of Windows uses little pictograms for Cut, Copy, and Paste, and if you want a full context menu you have to select it from the top menu, a retrograde step in my view. It seems that there are many Windows users out there who think the same as I do, though, because when you Google “Windows 10 Context Menu”, there are thousands of hits showing you how to achieve your aim. Perhaps Microsoft should take note and offer a choice of context menus at startup?

It’s probably an age thing, but I don’t get the use of so many pictograms in place of the written words. The Windows symbol for “Crop”, for example, means nothing to me. Sure, use the symbol, but put the word “Crop” underneath it for those of us that can read. It’s not just Microsoft, though, smartphone-based Millennials have been brought up on using pictures rather than words, and it’s they who are writing today’s software. Won’t anyone think of the old folk?

Time will tell if the new PC is up to the job, and I do intend to work it quite hard. For now, though, I will sit back and reflect on how all those years of setting up computers at work have proved to be very useful in retirement, even if I don’t need floppy disks anymore.