Three days ago, my desktop died. Today I took the needed action of unplugging it from the wall outlet. That is about the sum total of my looking at why it died so far.
With it being the holiday season, I simply have not felt like looking into the cause since I know I would not go looking for replacement parts during the Holidays.
I am not one that does a lot of backing up, have lost a lot of stuff because of that, but nothing earth shattering to lose. I think this is the first time a crashed computer may have given me cause to re-think about back-up, or at least storage of certain files.
I recently backed up my documents folder and several picture folders on to an external device, unfortunately I neglected to back up my spreadsheets. I thought they resided in my documents folder, but they did not.
With out my spreadsheets, my year end report is going to be a bit time consuming and missing items that I had kept track of all year. No real problem just time consuming.
They are really only losing part of my consumerism, I still have my X-Box, and I do want to get one of the new ones.
I really got use to using Windows 7, my lap-top has windows 10 which I find to be a waste of an operating system. It is far to intrusive, and by some of the reports I have read about Windows 11, those of us on limited incomes may want to avoid it until it has been out and thoroughly tested by people. Some of the reports are not that good.
Back to the Raspberry Pi. For just surfing and watching movies on Amazon Prime it works pretty good. Libre Office Suite works very good on it.
Based on my Raspberry Pi current experience I think I will be going for a Linux Operating System computer for a desktop if I find out my Windows Computer really is toast. I have not looked for Linux compatible games for the same reason I never looked for Apple compatible games, I was and sort of still am, a windows user.
I did notice the other day when I was looking through some of the games available on Steam, that some of them had an L next to them, I think to indicate they are Linux compatible.
As a retired person I try to keep un-needed expenses to a minimum without having to go with out things I like or enjoy. Right now last years Raspberry Pi is still keeping me connected, and every day that passes and I am away from the Microsoft environment the less likely I am to return to it.
While many would be unhappy at losing their primary internet and game computer so close to Christmas for me it has been a blessing of sorts. I am beginning to question if I even need a desktop again. I still need to go and download and install the free Gimp picture program or another one, and then re-find the simple screenshot, edit, view pictures program. I will get around to those chores soon since I do like including pictures with a post.
So a phone shot, a first crop on the phone and then emailed to myself:
And there you have it, my current temporary replacement for my desktop sitting on top of my fairly useless lap-top, I just really do not like Windows 10. The computer part is the white little box, as you can see it is just a little bit smaller than my 1 TB external storage rive. The two wires running out the left are the power and monitor. There are four USB ports below where the terabyte drive is plugged in, is a 32 MB thumb drive, it is currently empty, when I get around to rebuilding my spreadsheets they will be saved on it. the other two USB ports are taken up by my keyboard, (full sized not squished or crunched and with a full ten key pad).
A pretty small package, and to think last year it cost me about $150.00 I forget the exact price, but it is now almost fully replacing a $2000.00 computer from 2012.
There are a few more tools I need to find, but like I mentioned, this experience may give me the drive to explore a full blown Linux system very soon.
I hope every one has a very nice Holiday Season, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Some small disasters can prove to be useful.
Tiny Picture links back to my blog:
