A few weeks ago my 9 year old Fujitsu Siemens Amilo laptop went and died. Last Monday I was finally able to fetch my new HP Pavilion from the post office. Fortunately the old one had displayed worrisome CMOS battery symptoms for a couple of weeks, so I had very carefully made backup copies of everything - unlike the previous time when I inadvertently killed my then laptop by trying to fish out a stuck diskette from the drive with a knife, against my better knowledge.

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And now I have to get used to Windows 8, which is a big jump even from Windows 7, which we have at work, not to mention the familiar XP. The old one came with Works and Word installed, this one has hardly more than Word Pad in addition to all sorts of flashy items that I have no use for. I installed succesfully Open Office, which seems to work brilliantly, except for Base, which doesn't accept my few recipes from Works Database - unimportant, but annoying because I had written them down only this winter, and now I have to rescue the information from a wilderness of weird signs - if I can be bothered. But happily Paint Shop Pro 7 seems to work.