A New Work Laptop

After almost 5 years with the same work laptop I broke down and ordered a new one. I really liked my old 15-inch MacBook Pro and didn't want to take the time to get a new machine configured. The thing that caused me to finally break down and get one is that my old laptop needed a newer version of the operating system. The brain trust in our IT department recommended against an upgrade and so I took this chance to fix a few things that I didn't like about the old one.

This time I went smaller. I opted for the 13-inch MacBook Pro with the Retina display. So far I have to say that I really like the smaller form factor. My computer bag is so much lighter and I appreciate that. Sure I would have gotten more horsepower out of the 15-inch, but I mostly use my laptop for e-mail and spreadsheets. If I need more computing power, I have 2 desktops for that.

This time it was fairly painless setting up my new laptop as I had a nice backup of my other computer. While the old backup took about an hour to copy to my external USB drive, it only took 7 minutes to copy to my new computer, thanks to the USB 3.0 port. I highly recommend one.

In addition to copying files and setting up e-mail, which my IT department took care of, I also had to copy all of the bookmarks out of my browser. Fortunately this was a great time to go through and clean them out. I only ended up keeping about a half-dozen of them. I also had to go through and set up printers. The process was painless but something I had to remember to do so I could print my airplane ticket for tonight's flight.

I still have my old laptop for the next couple of days. My hope is that I don't have to turn it on. Then I will feel safe giving it to our IT department. Naturally I will remove all of my files from the machine as opposed to assuming it will get done for me. Then I really hope I got everything.