I was working hard on the laptop on my desk. I had Chrome open to read my email – that’s Yahoo as a catch-all, Gmail for one particular email address, and Outlook for email for an organization I am working with. I also had Facebook open. Then I had Edge open to run Microsoft 365 for another organization I work closely with. Then there was my desktop Outlook app for a third organization I have close ties with.
I was typing into Word to use its spellchecker and grammar checker. I had InDesign open for its publishing layout facilities. I had Photoshop open to create a graphic that was going into InDesign. Excel was open because I was doing some sums on it – for my accountant. And I had Sticky Notes open with a list of all the tasks I had to complete that day. I also keep Notepad open for when I want to take all the formatting out of any text that I’m copying from one app and pasting in another. A standard day.
I was jumping about from one application to another, I thought that I really could do with more screen real estate. I needed to see more of these applications at the same time. I remembered an ad I’d seen on Facebook a while back offering two additional screens to fit round your laptop’s screen. I looked on Amazon and they had the same thing available. The one criterion was that you needed a USB-C socket on your laptop. I did, so I ordered these extra screens. Happy days!
However, not all USB-C sockets are the same! The one I had was quite old. It was the right size and shape, but didn’t seem to handle video information transfer. Not to worry, I thought, I was going to buy a new laptop in the next few months, I’ll buy a new one with the latest USB-C ports, and I’ll make sure it has two of them. It seems it was many years ago that I last bought a new PC because my old one had the wrong holes in the back to connect peripheral devices. I ordered a new laptop with two USB-C ports, a 17 inch or so screen, and a 1TB SSD drive. All good, I thought.
Unfortunately, one of the USB-C ports was used to power the laptop. So, effectively, I only had one usable port. But that was OK – it connected to one screen, and I used a USB-A port and an HDMI port to connect to the other. Everything worked. But, of course, I hadn’t installed any software.
Firstly, I downloaded Chrome as my browser. Then I went to Microsoft 365 admin and downloaded Word, Excel, etc. No problems. I installed the printer drivers, and I could print. I installed Filezilla so I could upload files to my websites. I downloaded Audacity and FFmpeg for Audacity so that I could edit the sound files for my podcasts. I added Adblock Plus to my browser to reduce those pesky adverts. I downloaded VLC to watch videos. And I downloaded Windows 10 Firewall Control (even though I have Windows 11) to lock down my laptop. It was all going well.
I downloaded and paid for a new copy of Wondershare Filmora to be able to make and edit videos for my YouTube channel. I added the snipping tool and Notepad to my tool bar because I use them both a lot.
Then I wanted to install my old copy of Adobe Creative Suite (CS6), which is the last version you could actually own rather than pay monthly for. It installed it and it worked perfectly. Then I tried to restart my laptop, but it just wouldn’t start. I had to find the recovery key and use that to get to a screen that would wipe everything and restart. I tried installing CS6 first this second time, but the same thing happened when I restarted my machine. So, I wiped everything and started again. This time I looked for alternatives to the three main CS6 applications that I use.
I downloaded GIMP as a replacement for Photoshop. I’ve used it in the past and found it excellent. I downloaded CoffeCup as a Dreamweaver alternative, but it was free for only 30 days, so I tried Brackets, which is open-source software. It looked fine, but I found Phoenix Code as an update to Brackets. That seems to work really well for website creation. So, that’s what I’m using. Then I found Scribus as an alternative to InDesign. It’s different, but it offers much the same facilities – certainly so far. I just need to find some way to open InDesign files (I have lots of indd files) without having a copy of InDesign. I had already bought Kofax Power PDF Advanced, so I installed that on a second machine, and I can manipulate PDF files.
I use a VPN, and I needed to find some way of installing a free VPN. That proved harder, until I found the Opera GX browser, which acts as a VPN. So simple, and free!
I have one game on my work laptop, and I’ve had it for years and years. It’s Pinball Arcade from Microsoft in the 1990s. I could install it on my new laptop and start it, but the actual pinball games wouldn’t run. They’d crash my machine. I tried going through Properties and Compatibility mode with the EXE files, but it didn’t help. My solution was to download Steam and use the free pinball games on that. Not that I play pinball very often.
It did take a week, but I am now up and running, able to do everything I used to, and I have plenty of screen real estate to see what I’m working on. I did try to keep the price down. And I’m very happy. If you have any ideas of what I could have done better, please let me know.
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