I go through PC notebooks like high fashion models go through clothes - one a season it seems. For the last two weeks my latest notebook lost its display ability, which required me to unhook Pierre's screen from his PC and plug it into mine. It worked pretty well too, but Pierre was getting a little antsy! Then my notebook decided to not bring up its operating system. Many tries of turning it off and bringing it back up with no fix, resulted in my turning it over and shaking it vigorously. This not only fixed the problem, but temporarily fixed the display problem too. Nothing like a good shake to get things back in order again! It finally, however, became clear that it was time for another new PC.

At previous times like this, we have always had our techno-knowledgeable friend Paul to assist us at every turn. But now we aren't local and he can't come to dinner every Sunday as payback for his invaluable input so we were stuck with going it alone. OK, well I did run by him the details of the PC I was going to buy for final approval!

First we began by replacing our all in one printer. We bought an HP because we have always had luck with them. We were immediately impressed with how easy everything set up including making the PC part of our network and accessing it wirelessly. It went almost flawlessly.

Next we decided that we needed to upgrade our backup function. So we purchased a Western Digital MyBook device. And, other than a few dark moments, I managed to back up my old PC - seemed like a good thing to do - and then move all of my documents over to my new PC, including figuring out how to move all of my Outlook files (especially like important files containing Contacts and Calendar items). OK, for you techies, this sounds like small potatoes, but to us, it was huge.

And now I am figuring out Vista. It took us several minutes to figure out how to print from Outlook - clicking on the Windows logo is not immediately apparent. But so far, I have been very happy with all of the new functionality. It really feels like the security is much tighter especially in terms of Spam in Outlook.

I am really pretty excited about discovering lots of new bells and whistles in the Office 2007 edition. But I haven't as yet moved over my ITunes music as there appears to be some major glitches there and Apple is still working on a fix.

Emboldened by our weekend foray into technoland, we called Directv and ordered an HDnet DVR and we bought another small flat panel TV which Pierre hooked up himself although it required a joint effort to program the remote!

Watch out world, we might even decide to get rid of our 10+ year old VCR player soon!

Gillian Parrillo
The Sacramento Executive