That New Car Smell

I’m checking out the new gadgets, seeing where everything is in the new model, how it’s all laid out and generally getting used to having things in different locations.

In some ways, the old one was better; it got me where I was going, as they say, but it didn’t have the pep a new model has. I’ll be ok with it after a week or so.

Anybody who gets a new computer probably goes through this; I can’t be the only one. There are some features my old machine had which are missing here, as well as some new features which I wish were configured a bit differently.

But I went through that last time and quickly adapted.

There were a lot of icons on the main screen for programs I’d never use. I like clean screens, so I created (as I have done in the past) a main-screen folder titled, “Things I Don’t Want,” and dragged all of them into it. The five program icons I will use daily are lined up in the upper right corner. The four I am not sure of are lined up in the lower right corner. The four which must be on-screen (including my “Don’t Want”) are lined up in the upper left.

Nice and orderly. Lots of blue space without any background screen saver views making it hard to see the icons. Even the icons are re-labled from Microsoft’s multi-worded descriptions down to “E-mail,” “Documents,” and such. Live simple.