Close to Ecstasy

It's been an interesting twenty four hours.

First, I found that the reason that the new laptop, which came with Windows 8 and which I upgraded to 8.1 because I wanted to get the Start button (maybe it doesn't come with 8.1; it certainly didn't come to me) - anyway, the reason that the scrollable touch screen doesn't scroll anymore is a known problem after an upgrade from 8 to 8.1 .  I don't know if its Win 8.1, or individual devices, or what, but I found several posts on a Lenovo site talking about The scrolling worked and I did a Win 8.1 upgrade and now it doesn't, WTF???  Along with a plethora of do this do that do this tap your foot and whistle suggestions, some of which worked for some people and not for others. Hum.  So I'll be calling Lenovo's tech support today, and if they can get it working, good, but if not, I'm scrubbing the files I transferred (OBTW: the good news is that unlike in the past, the easy file transfer utility really does work; twenty seconds after I started it on the Win 7 and the Win 8 PCs, they were talking to each other through my network -- but verrrrrrrry slowly.  As in, the time estimate for file transfer went from 3H45M to about 5H15M over the course of an hour.  What is this, a byte every other second?  There is a cable you can buy that allows a direct connection between the two, and its abut $20; the direct connection allows faster transfer, and I'm thinking sure, we can do that -- and then I notice that it says it can't be used for transfers from 64 bit systems.  Which my Win7 system is.  Why?  I have no idea.  I mean, I have a hunch, but it really doesn't matter, I can't use the cable).  So I kind of don't want this problem to be fixable, so that I have a morally pure reason for returning the PC.  But I'm going to at least try.

Second, I finally got the damaged keyboard out of the Win7 PC -- the first site that told me how to do it was completely wrong, so wrong that there must be another computer called an HP62; either that, or they just screwed up; the second, a video, clearly showed how to do everything but disconnect the cable from the keyboard to the motherboard; and a third site mentioned when you are ready to unplug the keyboard, lift the little brown tab, which will unlock the keyboard cable from the motherboard. I did that, and it came right off. So right this minute I am using an external keyboard, and it's working just fine. (As long as the damaged keyboard had still been connected, the external keyboard worked but not all the time).  And I just ordered a replacement keyboard from someplace in China, cross my fingers.

But still.  Considering that twenty four hours ago I was glumly thinking about possibly having to spend much time and effort to move files over to the Win 8 PC, to be followed by tossing the Win 7 one, which I really like, and now it looks like I can keep it after all -- I am not a person who can easily be ecstatic, but this morning, I'm close.