new pie-uter (computer, in my family)

So, my beloved computer started doing fritzy things last week. My old computer had rarely done strange things, so the fact that it did something that required the recovery disc indicated that it was time to say goodbye. I'd been planning to get a new one a couple weeks from now, but I didn't want it to die in the middle of this week. That would be bad, since I have 3 papers due. Now I have a brand-new computer. It's very shiny (well, technically, no, but it's black and grown-up looking since I haven't had the chance to find any awesome stickers to put on the top). Winnifred1 (my old computer) is still waiting for me to finish taking stuff off of her hard drive. I have just about everything except for a bunch of pictures. It feels weird. I've had that computer since the end of high school. It was running on Windows XP and it had Microsoft Office 2000 on it. We may be able to reformat it and find someone who can use it, but if not, recycling is another option.

Winnifred2 is a brand-name computer, rather than the off-brand Winnifred1 was. She's a little bit smaller, much lighter, and has a couple keys on the keyboard swapped around, so I keep hitting 'function' rather than 'control.' The CD tray and USB ports are on the opposite side of what I'm used to. She has Windows 7 and Office 2007 and it's taking me a while to get used to it. For example "sleep mode" in 7 is the same thing as "stand-by mode" in XP. Everything's configured differently, and while Word still does all the same stuff, trying to figure out where all the right buttons are is taking me a while. There's a touchpad mouse, and one of those little eraser-shaped mouse buttons in the middle of the keyboard (I also have a USB mouse, which I prefer to use. It's less finicky and far less likely to make me accidentally copy things).

It looks nice, it responds well, and the only program on here that's annoyed me so far has been Norton Anti-Virus, which has been deleted and replaced with something else. Other than that, and getting used to the keyboard and the interface, I'm pretty happy with it. It's just...strange. I don't always do well with change (says the girl who packed up and moved to a different country to go to university). Some changes are easier to get used to than others, I suppose.

In the world of knitting, well, the brown striped socks are approaching the gusset increase (about 1 cm to go), the Jayne hat is finished and the black hat's nearly half-way done (apparently Brother 2 is giving me something amazing for Christmas, so he's going to get a really great black hat that will keep his ears and head nice and warm). In frustration yesterday, while working on a paper on my old computer while my husband started setting up my new one (although then he left to go ice-skating and I had to find the key for the internet and set up a network so I can print without having to put the file on a flash drive, and download Firefox and some other stuff all on my own. And it worked, which was nice. Went around in a circle for a little bit while I tried to get the IPA keyboard working, but in the end, I won), I started knitting a new pair of socks. These are an experiment to see if a 48 st sock (fingering weight, 2.5 mm needles) will fit my foot and not stretch out too big (the problem with normal sock circumferences seems to be that the stretch that happens with any sock is meant to accomodate someone with slightly wider feet than me. They also get droopy around the ankles really fast). I really need 2.0 mm needles for some socks, since some patterns don't allow much variation without looking way different, but this pattern was designed for sport-weight yarn. I'm happy with the results so far, but I'm not very far into them yet. Homework is the priority right now, after all. Knitting is mostly happening at knitting groups. And if my brain really, really needs a break.