I am back after another hiatus and a laptop change

Two and a half months ago this blog, and my writing-oriented blog, From Both Sides of the Fence, went on what I thought at the time would be a permanent vacation. When this hiatus began, I was deep into participating in the 11th annual National Novel Writing Month contest (I won, as usual) and was struggling with an eight year old Sony laptop, and its arthritic keyboard.

Thanks entirely to a surprise offer from a relative in December, I have retired the Sony Vaio laptop, replacing it with a new Hewlett Packard Pavillion laptop. At the same time that I gained a larger screen and keyboard, this changeover also allowed me to upgrade from Windows XP (32 bit) to 64 bit Windows 7 Professional.

I have never been much of a Microsoft booster. Still, with Windows 7, I feel like Microsoft finally has developed a Windows version that really works. For the first time, I feel like Windows is working for me, rather than against me. For the first time, perhaps ever, the Internet is a joy to use because it is so colorful and fast.

For the first time since I launched these blogs, I can finally see them the way other visitors to them do. I am quite pleased at the colorful appearances of both, appearances I previously could only guess at due to limitations in the older laptop.

So Random Musings is back in production, this time much more likely to stay that way.