Posts Tagged gadgets
Getting the most out of your old computer
So my mom has this old computer. It’s pushing archaic – all of 7 years old. She and I dream of getting rid of the thing and replacing it with a sweet little suped-up laptop. In this fantasy of ours, she need not upgrade from her rotten, rural dial-up Internet; she can cart her Wi-Fi capable machine over to her friend’s house and they can go crazy with photo sharing, social networking, recipe searching, yoga-ing, and whatever else they might think up. This is a nice little plan we have going, but in reality, the washing machine (which my mother has taken apart and fixed herself twice in the last year) will be replaced before the computer.
So in the meantime, we are stuck brainstorming ways to make the old machine work for her. It’s a good computer, so we have a good starting point, but it’s memory is overstuffed so it just putts along, it’s software is outdated so photo management and editing is a nightmare. Here’s what we’re thinking of doing.
1. Invest in an external hard drive. Many older computers run poorly because they were not equipped to handle the large files that are used today. Photos, music, and downloaded files with images in them can fill an older computer’s memory in a big hurry. A simple (and somewhat affordable) fix is to move those files onto an external hard drive. This nifty device connects to your computer via USB port (that flat-looking hole about the width of your finger) and can hold thousands of digital photos. An average external hard drive can cost between $80-$150 and can give your machine the speed of its youth.
2. Invest in a USB flash drive. About the size of your thumb, this little stick is the new-age floppy disk. It plugs into the USB port on a computer (described above), and transferring files can be as easy as click-and-drag. A 4 GB flash drive, which can cost between 10 and 20 dollars, can hold hundreds of digital photos. The flash drive has some cool uses. You can save photos from a home computer onto it, bring it to a photo center (like Meijer or Walgreen’s) and plug it into the photo center computer to order prints. You can also download files from the internet while on a public computer (say, at your library), save them to the flash drive, and transfer the files from it to your home computer. If your library has excellent software (like CADL has), you can put a few photos onto your flash drive, slip that thing into your pocket, and head on over to the library to use the photo-editing software on those computers.
3. Get yourself out of the house and take advantage of outside resources!Libraries are a great place to get to know. The people working are competent, happy to help, and accustomed to questions; the Internet is generally fast; and the software is up-to-date. In my mom’s case, her library isn’t so sweet, but she does have a friend (with a bells-and-whistles computer and lightening-fast Internet) who loves to have visitors. Either way, getting out does a person good. And didn’t we learn in kindergarten that sharing makes us better people? Getting the most out of your old computer might just become a way to get re-connected to friends and community.
Add comment February 3, 2009
