| March 5th, 2019 |
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So, in my last post I left out some more unpleasantness of the last couple of weeks.
I broke my tablet.
I'd put it where I usually put it but somehow this time I knocked it off, it landed, clearly, at the worst possible angle, and the screen was shattered.
It still works, kinda, but I've been avoiding using it in any way lest I do something that disrupts my ability to get all my data off, which I'm going to want to.
We took it to the repair guy for a quote, but Samsung parts are apparently now very expensive, and it would cost $300 just for the screen, which seems like too much for a tablet over five years old that's been starting to struggle.
I'd been thinking about replacing it for a while, but was holding off until something that actually seemed like an upgrade was available.
That time is still not yet.
Samsung tablets are now priced at "you might as well get a laptop" and don't include the functionality the one I bought in 2013 had. Hell no.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) velithya spent most of a day researching (I was still sick and I think I was just too pathetic for her to ignore) and came up with the conclusion that an iPad 6+Apple Pencil was probably my best bet.
So I bought those.
And I hated them. I tried - I spent hours messing around with them - but the iPad's UI design is atrocious. Absolutely nothing is intuitive. "I want to close this program, so... I drag my finger slowly up one side of the screen?" Who the hell thought that made sense? "Oh, and I have to do it five or six times until I get the angle exactly right and do it slowly enough but not too slowly."
On my old tablet, that process involved: "Press home button. Touch applications icon."
No piece of electronics has ever inspired more thorough and profound hate in me in less time than the iPad 6.
Also, the Apple Pencil isn't very good, the tip design is absolutely rubbish. And the charging end and its accessories seem to be designed to get lost and require you to buy replacements and/or to break the charging port on your iPad.
So those were returned to the shop for a refund, because I'm not paying hundreds of dollars to be annoyed by the appalling design flaws of morally dubious electronics that I won't use if I can avoid it because I hate everything about the user experience.
Instead, we checked out a second-hand Surface Pro 3, and ended up deciding to buy it.
Now, I'll note that the hardware did and does seem completely fine, and the operating system was reset to factory settings, so none of this is on the previous owners.
The first morning I had it, I wanted to use it to watch basketball, because at this point my laptop was still in for service.
I wanted to be able to put it on the TV so I could use the Surface for other things.
So I installed Chrome, in order to use Chromecast.
Once I had the game playing on the TV, though, I had the issue that - even after I closed the Chrome window - the thing was running very, very slowly.
Fun fact: The Surface Pro 3 has 4GB of memory. Somehow, Windows 10 had this at less than one available.
I hate Windows 10, by the way, just not as much as I hate the iPad 6's OS. Windows 10 sucks but it actually lets me access the information that tells me why it sucks, it lets me adjust assorted settings where the iPad 6 just tells me not to worry my pretty little head about that, and it does things like "have actual buttons to do the basic system operations instead of wanting me to intuit arcane symbols to draw on the screen".
So I was wanting to try and poke at this issue, and rebooted the Surface.
It came back without audio or network capacity.
Diagnostics came up with nothing, and were like "try here to find more information on the internet" you little shit you're not recognising the network.
Oh well, say I. I haven't actually made significant changes to this thing yet. Reset to factory settings again!
... that throws an error.
... "Undoing changes," it says.
... except now it can't boot at all.
So, we had to download Windows 10 install media, and put those on a thumb drive, except that didn't work either, because it turns out the thumb drive was faulty.
IT WAS A DAY
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