The long-awaited new Gigabyte P55W v5 laptop has arrived and is now in partial service. It’s nice—speedy, plenty of RAM, comfortable to use, and has a bright 1920×1080 screen.
Windows 10 is turning out to be sort of a semi-issue. I’m still learning the new bits, but after installing Fences and Start10 from Stardock, it’s a bit more familiar. One of my favorite system info tools (SIV) crashes when I update the definition files, so I’m going to have to figure that out. I’m also not used to having it linked to a Microsoft online account.
The keyboard is a bigger issue. I like the keyboard action, but the layout is ever-so-slightly different from my old HP Win7 system. The bottom-right area with the Ctrl, Shift, arrow, and zero keys is laid out in a way that’ll force me to retrain my muscle memory. The Ctrl key and arrow keys are larger, and the Shift key and zero key (on the number pad) are smaller.
All of the above pales in comparison to the biggest issue: transferring my setup from the old HP to the new Gigabyte system. I’ve had the HP since 2009, and as a result it has a lot of documents, videos, pictures, music, and programs installed. I’ve got to move the first four in that list and reinstall/configure the programs from scratch. I lucked out with Firefox, since I was able to use its Sync feature to get my bookmarks transferred and a couple of plugins called CLEO and OPIE to reinstall all of my extensions and their preferences in one shot (well, two—I had to export my NoScript whitelist separately).
This is all old hat to anyone who’s had to transfer things from an old system to a new one, of course. At least I don’t have any copy-protection issues like I did with the music computer transfer.
Have you had a nightmare of a transfer experience? Let me know about it via the Contact page. Thank you for reading!