the_rck | (no subject)

Aetna says they can’t give me any sort of idea about coverage for potential knee surgery without specific procedure codes. Scott and Cordelia weren’t out long enough for me to try to track down procedure codes because it would mean at least two more phone calls. As it was, they came in the door while I was still talking to Aetna.

I didn’t do any writing yesterday. I’m hoping today will be better, but I don’t know if it will be. I’ve got a headache and have since I woke around 8:30. How bad it is varies from moment to moment, so maybe I will be able to write later. I really want to because I hardly wrote anything at all on Monday, maybe 100 words if that.

Cordelia’s PT went okay. Scott and I are both now clear on what exercises she should be doing and how often, so she won’t be able to tell us that she doesn’t have any exercises that she’s supposed to do. I’m not sure why she’s so set against doing exercises. None of them take more than five minutes at a time, and most of them are only once a day.

I’m worried that my laptop isn’t going to last the two plus years until we can even start thinking about replacing it. A lot of things simply aren’t working right, and it’s heating up more and faster than it used to. I’m having problems with programs that are integral to the OS— Mail, Messages, Calendar— and things are freezing (temporarily) more often. I can’t, for example, load a webpage while Time Capsule is running a backup. I also have problems if I start trying to load a web page at the moment when iTunes is switching from one song to the next.

I’ve already hit the edge of the OS updates that my hardware will support. This laptop was made in late 2008 and so is almost ten years old (we bought it refurbished somewhere between two and five years ago).

We’re still paying off this laptop and the nearly identical one that Scott bought for Cordelia at the same time. Given that Scott is taking financial comfort right now in the idea that he could raid his 401K if things get worse… Well, yeah. We’re not buying new-to-us Mac laptops any time soon.

But maybe I could get something else if I ask everyone to give me money for my birthday and Christmas this year?

It’s been years since I used a computer that wasn’t from Apple. Would it be hard to move to using a cheaper, non-Apple laptop? Mostly, what I need is a calendar, word processing, email, chat/IRC, and a couple of web browsers. Being able to transfer my music would be nice but not a deal breaker if I couldn’t. (My old laptop still works, after all, and it would probably be fine just for playing music.) It would be a deal breaker if I couldn’t open my old files, though, or if I lost my email archives. Oh, and I’d want to be able to network with our printer, but I assume most (all?) laptops should be able to do that.

I don’t generally play games or stream video or muck around with photographs, so I’m not worried about anything required for those that isn’t also required for the things I listed above. I’m not wedded to any particular word processor; mostly, what I want is plain text. Page/word counts are nice, but I can do without both.

Scott and Cordelia use Mac laptops and both have iPhones and iPads. I don’t have either an iPad or an iPhone and don’t expect to, so cross compatibility isn’t really an issue.

I don’t have any idea how to do the basic research I’d need to do to look into this. I’m not sure if Scott will be willing to help me because I’m pretty sure he sees it as a failure on his part rather than as a result of me spending more than half my time on my laptop.

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You could start here: The Best Cheap Laptops of 2017.

And back up your files, of course.

Thanks! I have to figure out what I actually need. My current hard drive is 250 GB, and I'm using 200 GB of that, most of it music and programs that I don't actually use.

We back up regularly. That's what Time Capsule is.

As far as I know the trouble is moving itunes and purely mac programmes. So if your email is an apple email ect. Otherwise most programmes work on 'normal' pcs. To be honest in this day and age there is little apple can do that others cant and a transition back to 'windows' and 'android' may help you save more long term and be easier to save material.

I think that email would be a huge problem. I only store my email archives on my laptop, in the Mac mail program. I keep as little as possible actually stored on my Gmail account because I don't want Google to have ongoing access to those messages (and because seeing an inbox fill up like that sets off my anxiety hugely).

I have *never* used Windows. I used Commodores in high school, Macs in college, an Amiga in grad school, and Macs thereafter. I lost a lot of files going from Commodores to Macs to the Amiga and back to Macs.

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I personally run a refurbished PC that is dual-booting Windows and Linux. I use Linux for most of my actual everything, and Windows for some games. (Nothing too demanding, it's not a gaming machine, but for Steam games.)

I could just as easily have kept it Windows-only, but I like Linux and also I'm a cheap-ass so.

It's as <user="ayebydan"> says, the things hardest to move from Apple are itunes and anything you bought from the App store. Also if you use a mac email address you might need to transition that? But yes.

The problem is that my email archives are offline only and in the Mac mail program. I've got hundreds, possibly thousands, and I really don't want to have to do something ridiculous like forwarding them all, one at a time, to Gmail.

I've only purchased two albums from iTunes. Everything else came from CDs, and I think those files would be transferable without too much trouble. But I am thinking that I might keep this laptop and just use it for my music and/or for watching DVDs. Most of the laptops I'm seeing don't have internal CD drives, and well, I use mine almost constantly. We have an external drive, but the place I normally sit (the place where I won't hurt myself using the laptop) has no place for that to go.

With Mozilla Firefox there's a way to back up an offline email archive and transfer it or just save copies of the files. I assume there's something like that for Macs, what I'm not sure about is accessing those files on Windows.