New Tech

  • Posted by Shaun on July 23rd, 2009 filed in Junk drawer
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It took some time to happen, but we recently gained some new tech in our house. First up was becoming full-fledged cell phone owners. Sue had a phone about 10 years ago and I never had one. We’ve finally had too many problems happen that could have either been prevented or lessened if we had phones and could contact each other. So, we broke down and got ourselves a family plan and matching phones. Not to mention our house phone died suddenly. It was a nice Siemens phone with one base and three handsets. The base broke and now everything is useless. We still have our home phone, but we are likely going to just port the number to Sue’s phone and get rid of our landline.

So far the service has been great. We are using AT&T and I have absolutely no complaints. Even when I only have 1-3 bars I get perfect quality calls. Getting used to the phone is another story. It plays mp3 files and has a button on the outside that automatically plays music if bumped. It’s already happened where my pocket began to play music when I changed position. We leave music off the phones for now. The phones we have are Motorola EM330, one of the free models we could chose from. Not bad for a free phone.

The second new piece of technology is not all that new in the sense that we never had one, but new in the sense that it has been nearly 4 years since we got a new one. Sue bought me (us?) a new laptop. It’s a nice Dell Inspiron 1545. Nothing high end, but not too basic. In fact it has more than enough power, disk and memory for what I need. I’ve even adjusted to using Vista, which isn’t too bad. It gets a worse wrap than it deserves, but it does eat up memory like crazy. I have 4GB of memory and just shy of 2GB are used up just sitting idly.

Having a second laptop in the house has been a peace maker. We’re no longer fighting over who is going to use the laptop and no hurt feelings when the other person cannot stop what they are doing. It’s lead to some late nights though. I can finally keep up with reading online and Sue gets sucked into her Chinese books. I’m also catching up on this season’s TopGear episodes. Migrating all my files and settings over to the new laptop is taking time, but it’ll eventually be done.