THE STORY SO FAR: PART 84

BUT DOES THE THING WORK?

Today I decided to give Spinnaker a workout—both by writing my backlog of blogs—and by doing as much of my normal work on it as possible. It is my experience that you can only really assess a computer by using it operationally. Pecking away at a keyboard in a showroom doesn’t really cut it as far as I am concerned.

The dreaded Delete key was a feature once again—so I will just have to retrain my muscle memory. That apart, I am essentially very pleased with my HP ENVY dv7 (Spinnaker) except for two observations:

• The keyboard leaves something to be desired—though I am sure I will get used to it.
• The screen—while quite adequate for my current purposes—seems to darken the colors compared to other screens.

Set against the power and speed, these are small issues.

I loaded up Windows Live Writer today. This is part of Windows Essentials and was prone to crash when I used it on my previous machine—probably because it ran out of resources. This time I downloaded an upgrade and it worked perfectly. It is a program I like a great deal because it works pretty much like a word-processor; and yet you can edit HTML if so included—and the Preview Mode is excellent. In short, it makes blogging much easier and faster. Apparently, it works better still for WordPress—which I really should be using instead of Blogger—but I have no complaints.

Tomorrow, I intend to partition Spinnaker’s hard drive and start copying data across. I normally keep my data away from programs on its own partition. Better housekeeping apparently.

After that, apart from a lot of learning and tidying up, I should be operational again, and hopefully can think rather more about writing and publishing than computers. Nonetheless, I am glad I have spent the time I have trying to reach a certain minimum level of computer competence; or I’d be rather helpless. A writer really should have a working knowledge of the tools of his trade. Mine has been hard won, let me tell you. It is one thing to work in an area which you love, and where it appears you have some natural talent—such as writing. It takes pure willpower to work on something for which you have neither natural aptitude nor intrinsic interest. But it was, and remains, necessary—and I wish I had adopted such a pro-active approach much sooner.