I have been using a computer for over 30 years. Through that time, I my relationship with computers, cell phones and other computer systems have had many ups and downs, frustrations, and pleasant surprises. For most of those 30 years, I have relied on Macs. They have been reliable, great for graphics and the programs we used in the paper were all created focused on the capabilities of that brand. Eventually the programs evolved so that windows operating systems could also take advantage of those unique capabilities.
When I retired five years ago, I chose to pick up a Windows Surface. It was lightweight. It could stream movies and remembered the passwords to many of my aps and sights. It had one downfall. The keyboards seemed to fail and over the past five years, the keyboard was replaced twice. In mid-August, the keyboard failed again, and I began looking for a replacement.
The question in my mind remained. Do I stick with a Surface, or a brand that offered similar features in a small format, try a chrome book or migrate back to the Mac brand? For over a month I read everything I could about the benefits and negatives of each system. Eventually after visiting stores and talking to salespeople I chose to return to Macs.
It is easy to migrate documents between similar operating systems. Not so when you cross platforms. That was my biggest fear. I had not migrated much to the windows system five years ago, but I didn’t want to lose what was on the Surface. There should be an easy way and if it was not obvious, then Google could come to my rescue and tell me how to solve the issue. It worked.
Then things became strange. As I migrated documents from the old computer to the new, the Surface keyboard sprang to life. And then on Monday morning, the keyboard on the Surface again refused to work. It was not all rosy though. The new computer locked up and the mouse refused to connect to the Mac. Off I went to the Mac gurus at the newspaper. They have solved Mac issues for three decades. They could solve my new computer problem. Three keystrokes later everything worked. The mouse connected just as it should. I was elated. I could now write this column.
There was no reason for the initial failure. Just as there was no reason for the Surface keyboard to suddenly spring to life after three weeks of silence only to again fail twenty-four hours later. Computers remain a mystery. We all depend on our computers and cell phones and when they fail, we feel abandoned. Our lives revolve around the phone and our computers. We immediately ask Siri or Google to give us the weather in the morning. My Libre 2 caused my cell phone to ring out notifying me of high blood sugar. My phone beeped on the way to coffee to give me the tornado warning just as it had for heat warnings and heavy storms in the summer. I am dependent on this technology.
