I’m doing my best not to sink and determined not to call for a lifebelt!
I thought it was time to get out the “Samsung Ultrabook” and give it a whirl. Put it through its paces and make sure it could manage what I had in mind for it. Mind you, my hero has been doing a bit of laptop-whispering in the last few days and I believe he has made it (almost) watertight.
Windows 8, that is.
My knowledgeable and very computer-literate friends have resorted to all kinds of desperate measures and I’ve heard all kinds of stories from those who have swum in this pool already. We’d have been very happy to have continued with Windows 7, puttering along doing what we do and knowing how to do it. But a new machine meant a new operating system, so we pinched our noses, took a deep breath and jumped straight in at the deep end. Well, my hero did the jumping in…I’ve just swum a width at the shallow end.
Enough of the metaphors! Before I even hit the “on” button, my hero reduced the number of tiles on the opening page, making sure there was no unnecessary clutter to distract us from what we wanted to do. We don’t need a complicated laptop, just a machine which would do the normal, everyday tasks we expect it to do: email, photo management, reading and writing blogs and browsing the internet. We’ve got our favourite bookmarks there, customised the toolbars and that’s about it.
Oh, and I haven’t put any photos on it yet.
Did you guess?
One thing did defeat me in the end - I couldn't work out how to shut it down. Cntl-Alt-Del delivered the "shut down" option in the end. Seemed pretty drastic to me!
