Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Technology

I thought I would share a little more of last week's events... while we were celebrating the adoption anniversary, and Daddio's birthday... there was an undercurrent of frustration. We will call it 'The Great Upgrade of 2007'.

It all started with Daddio getting the Photoshop Elements/Premier bundle for his birthday... a few days early. After fiddling with it on Wednesday night, we realized that our 3.5 year old computer simply couldn't handle the video editing portion... we had the wrong kind of processor to start off with followed by not enough RAM, we really should have had a better video card... anyway you get my point. We/Daddio spent a few hours on the phone with a friend trying to figure out what would be the best option: new computer or replace/upgrade what we had on the old. Tallying up upgrades we were somewhere in the ballpark of $300+, and decided that would really be throwing good money after bad (a new phrase Daddio taught our Costa Rican friend on the phone). So it was pretty much decided that we would buy a new one in the future... when ever that might be.

Fast forward about 12 hours to Thursday... after practically all night of researching online, we narrowed down what we wanted, and after a fun late breakfast at McD's we popped into our local electronics store for our computer purchase. The young man who helped us was very nice, and very knowledgeable (note to self: send a note to the store manager about John). While making the purchase we had lots of questions, and our sales guy had all the answers!!! And then it came to me, he couldn't have been more than 20!! Here he was 8+ years younger than us, and was rattling off all sorts of things... he lost me after 'yes ma'am it can do that'! I felt old... anyway. So we got the computer plus a few other things we naturally needed... cause we were in an electronics store!

Home again, home again... did I mention that this is the same Thursday that we hosted the little party... okay so we fed the kids, put them down for a nap while we worked on getting the new computer up and running, played with it for a little while, then I headed to the store for the final provisions (ICE CREAM). Next the fun party, and then off to bed.

Friday, after our lovely Blessing Mass for the homeschooling group, we were home again to play with the new purchase. Now it was time to finally dump our family videos spanning 3 years on to our computer (something we were never truly successful with on our old computer with some other very unpleasant software). Oh, I should also mention now, that all the new fangled computers come with VISTA now, not Windows XP. We hook up the video camera and....

wait for it....

Vista is too new and there is no plugin (yet) for our three year old camcorder! Are you freakin' kidding me???? Meaning our computer WON'T for any reason talk to our camcorder... WHAT... I just spent how much money buying a whole new dang computer because I already bought a new video editing software that wouldn't work on my old one... only to find that out after I had tried to install it... voiding any chance of returning it to either get my money back or try and find something that would work... and now I STILL CAN'T GET THE VIDEO OFF THE CAMERA TO EDIT IT ON MY NEW LATEST/GREATEST COMPUTER... remove the fork from my hand before I poke myself in the eye!

After exhaustive phone conversations with electronic store, camcorder maker, Internet searches... blah blah blah, there is a way to do it, but we will have to buy more things to make it happen.

SERIOUSLY.

There are times when the progression of technology really sucks!

2 comments:

nicole said...

My eyes glazed over at the mention of Photoshop. :) Good luck on your continuing technology adventures. Now we know who to call if we ever upgrade. Which is not likely. I barely know how to use what I have.

Anonymous said...

watch this!!

To bad you bought a PC :-(

Apple just came out with a new version of iMovie and it is killer!!

You could always bring your camera over and use a real computer if you want...

-the Tocci's