Emergency Laptop surgery fails..!!

Santa Fe, Nm

We came here to Santa Fe this afternoon since it was hot in Albuquerque, and it is higher in altitude and cooler here.  Besides we were tired of the same old route and thought this might be a nice change.

Neither of us has ever been here before and have no idea how to get around, other than what the GPS tells us to do.... and it has a four year old outdated map in it and it was purchased before new maps were free.....  So buying a new map will cost more than a new machine will cost...

Oh, and speaking of a new machine, sometime between when we pulled off of the interstate at the route 66 casino to park and look up campgrounds and arriving here, evidently my laptop must have fallen to the floor in the motorhome, because the hard drive won't boot the machine....

And no it hasn't been backed up lately,  been meaning to do that but my old portable drive is broken too.... And I never think of buying one when I'm at a store....  Now if I was in KC, I would go get a new hard drive and restore from the old original DVDs, but since I am not, the first thing I had to go find here in Santa Fe was a Best Buy store where I purchased the very cheapest HP laptop that they had...   It has an AMD processor that is on the cutting edge of extinction, and a 500 gig hard drive....

But even then it is still much bigger and faster than the three year old machine that went kaput!  Of course the keyboard is just slightly different and my touch typing is off so I am making lots or mistakes.....

I wanted to wait and get a new laptop with windows 8 on it, and just didn't make it...  The one thing that I do like, was that I downloaded Google Chrome, using the MS IE that was loaded and defaulted as a browser. And then changing this default to chrome, all my settings and bookmarks were out on the cloud with Google....  Yea!

I signed in and bam!  It was all restored from Mama Google..... Well at least something looks the same.....

We are currently camped at the Santa Fe Skies RV park South of the town of Santa Fe...  It was out in the boonies to the East of the highway.. But the GPS found it....  I was loosing faith.

This campground is on the side of a hill with terraced pull thru sites.. It was about 95 here this afternoon and the roads and pull thru sites are all gravel and dusty.... Loyce likes her camp sites in concrete and without dust...  But then again we haven't been here before.  RV Parks reviews liked it!

I was too busy trying to frantically get the computer to read the hard drive....

But we are on a big hill looking down on the town and the satellite found its bird right off, and the Verizon signal is good....  I paid for two nights, but perhaps we might not stay if mama isn't happy..

Anyway,  I have now resigned myself that a laptop is a laptop, even if it doesn't have all those dirty old files on it....  I will have to go on a scrimmage looking for old picture cards.....  And the ones I put on the blog are still on Picasa Web Albums..

Hey, I had better go download Picasa  can't go without that.....!  I have a a lot of configuring to do.....

Retired Rod