Now that all of this is loaded to my liking, the hard drive is compressed and defragmented, the only thing that I have to do left is drop one 8GB stick of RAM into it to max it out and everything will be precisely as I want it to be. Sadly I can’t drop the 16GB stick of RAM from our previous laptop into this one because that one ran DDR4 RAM and this one runs DDR3, but the specs are otherwise nearly comparable and in some aspects actually exceed the previous laptop that we owned. I just need to get used to the slightly different keyboard schematics that this one has because our previous laptop was a Lenovo and this one is a Hewlett-Packard (and at that, the first Hewlett-Packard laptop that I have ever owned… not that I have anything negative to say about it, of course), but once I get past the minor changes in how the keyboard is set up, I think everything will run completely smoothly. And while I’ve been doing that, to save myself some space and some trouble, I’ve been uninstalling some of the apps that have come with it that I have no need for.

I also came to the surprising conclusion that this has a fully functional touchscreen. I did not realize that until I accidentally touched the screen and something moved. You weren’t supposed to do that, computer! I haven’t gotten around to disabling it yet because the kids actually have not noticed it yet, but I think I will.

Did you know that after compressing one’s hard drive, it gets fragmented like… well, whoa, though?

And that the best thing is to go back in and defragment it all over again? I don’t understand this one bit.

I seriously had some files that had fragments as high as in the six thousands. Luckily not a whole lot, but…

I was able to take the game data from those large Origin and Steam games that I had mentioned, put it in the correct (anticipated) folders, have Origin and Steam “find” that the games were there and verify all of the game files, and I saved myself what would probably have been ten hours worth of downloading and patching by following some instructions online! Now all I have to do is defragment the computer, compress the hard drive, make sure that Windows is fully patched, make restore discs if Windows 10 still lets you do that and I am done loading this computer! Needless to say, it’s been awhile since I have had to fully load a computer, and since I happened to pick this one up at a pawn shop I had to load Windows 10 on it from complete scratch because there was an administrator account already on it that I had the password to and there was no getting around that to put my own administrator account on. At least we’ve long cleared that problem. Frankly, it has been worth all of the migraines that this has literally caused. It has caused several.

At least now I know how to save myself a lot of time on down the line if I need to replace this computer too…

Maybe when you have a whole lot of stuff on your computer, you underestimate how long it will take to load your new computer… especially when a lot of what is on your computer needs to be downloaded from the Internet, and download speeds only go so fast even when you have a reliably good Internet connection (most of the time). Although I love having digital copies of games in that I can download them from the Internet whenever something needs to be replaced because the prior version of it ceased to function, whether that is a computer or a video game console, the one thing that I don’t like about that is the sheer size of some of these games and how long it actually takes most to download them on a decent connection.

I’ve tried to lift as much as I can from my old computer while it still functions and see if I can use a microSD card to bring it over to this one, though. I mean, I legally own everything that I’m attempting to bring over.

But I suppose we’ll see how that goes as I put everything back on this computer from the microSD.

Since the a key continued to go out at varying intervals and the keyboard — which wasn’t one of those types that could easily be replaced, let alone replaced, because it was an integral part of the laptop — was behaving in a manner indicative of increasingly more keys failing, I knew that I had to replace the laptop at some point, sooner rather than later. It may have taken the better part of a day to load it once I found one that I liked enough to purchase, but here we are! It actually has slightly better specs than the one that I had before it, although my goal was to replace it with as close to a laptop as the one that I had before it — the one that it would be replacing, in other words. This wasn’t exactly something that I had much of a chance to plan, what with the keys on our previous laptop’s keyboard not exactly choosing the most opportune time to start to go out. The only thing that I’ve noticed that is… not quite as good as our previous laptop is the Wi-fi card, but I’ve begun to do some reading on that, and apparently that can be fixed with a USB dongle if I really want to. I might look into that at a later date, because I would need to figure out what dongle to get.

I’m happy that we have a laptop with a functioning keyboard that doesn’t have one foot “in the grave”!