(Update: 21-05-2021), I’m in the process of moving Hosts, but I’m also dragging all this old tat over with me (for prosperity), because you never know, years from now – the data miners and text diggers might find it amusing. A less amusing fact: is that all of my old download links have been removed.

It’s now Feb, and this has become annoying. I was currently working across three (four) Machines. One in my Bedroom. Two in my Study and one in the front room, humourlessly called ‘TV One!’: Now I’ve been writing like this for years, but since NaNoWriMo I’ve become confused as to what review, version and edition I’m working on.

It came to a point two weeks into the new year when I started  re-writing a backup copy of ‘The Trinity’. After three hours of revision I slowly realised I’d been covering old ground. Then found the latest version I’d been working on the previous night. Oh Boy! .. to put it mildly: I was ‘Pissed’. So the next day I went shopping. I was in the market for a Laptop.

But, it had to have the perfect Keyboard.

I knew in my mind the keyboard had to have a large Return Key. A soft feel. Function Keys that are large enough to hit on the fly. A Delete key and Backspace Key that are large enough to use and not just tucked away somewhere. Also it must have Navigation Keys that are usable. With the Up and Down Arrow keys located sensibly. The Page Up, Down, End and Home keys had to be in a world of their own, instead of being part of a secondary function; as in pressing Alt: or Ctrl: to activate them. This list of requirements proved hard to full fill.

Comet, PC World, Dixon’s Maplin’s aka Tandy: (grin), well anyhow none of them had the perfect keyboard. I even went on-line. In desperation I wandered into Staples, and found a laptop for £475.00 more that I wanted to pay, but it was on special and the Keyboard was perfect.

Image included.

It’s an HP Pavilion DV6 – 3119SA Laptop and I’ve got to say I’m quite impressed with it. But being as I bought it last week it’s taken that long to sort out my Book Files and all the supporting research notes.

The set of software I use proved even more challenging. Finding and moving Amy from IVONA was relatively easy. It’s the screen reading programme I use, and is really good. I’ve had to root out and reinstall ClaroRead 5.7: Because I’ve finally ditched ‘Word’ in favour of ‘Scrivener’. Which is the absolute Bee’s Knees. Highly recommend, and all that; along with digging out all the relevant serial numbers.

Other things: I use Thunderbird as my eMail client and that was fun moving all my emails over to the new machine. As for my Browser? I’ve finally given up with Explorer. It’s just too buggy on some web sites, even version 8.0: So I’m now using Mozilla Firefox. It’s very good, and fast.

I then had to transfer all of this lot over the LAN and onto the new machine.

It’s a never ending story, grin.

Thanks for reading, Jessica: Praise be the ORI.

(Update: 21-05-2021, you’d never know it, but this was the first time that I clumsily stated using the built in WordPress shortcodes, and that strapline above is one of them.)