Getting Nimble Digitally

So my laptop has been getting a bit overused and overtaxed recently. So it was time for some upgrades and some changes to our computer use.

For starters, I finally signed up for our own DSL service. I've been a bit of a pirate, grabbling the signal from the crap public wifi or one of our neighbors. But now we've got dedicated wifi, secure, within the home. This makes me more mobile as I can now get wifi in the kitchen or living room instead of only upstairs. Hopefully I'll be less of a hermit but still as connected.

Friday I did a bit of retail therapy and bought a 160GB portable hard drive. It's shiny cherry chrome red. Pretty, actually. I've moved over half of the items from the laptop to the drive which has resulted in the laptop moving a bit quicker.

This morning I decided that I needed more RAM. I was trying to open a very involved webpage and I couldn't do it, even with the stronger wifi signal. So, Staples and their Easy button provided me 1GB of RAM for a song. I installed it correctly. Nothing exploded.

So, I'm pleased as punch with my laptop. It's behaving like it's brand new except I know how to use it. That gives me a slight advantage if we were keeping score. Aw hell, why don't we?

Bruce 2 Laptop 0

The next goal in getting nimble is to burn some copies of my favorite CDs, plant them in a big wallet carrier and use them in my car instead of the original discs. It should allow me to keep the car more organized as well as the homestead. But it will take some time to put it together.

Have any of you recently done some similar upgrades? If so, what have you done and did it work out as you had hoped?

B!