Monday, March 28, 2011 - Runaround Day

Being on his own and self-employed, my brother has been having some trouble keeping up with everything both business and personal, so I offered to help him try to simplify some things. He overpays for his insurance (he uses four different insurance companies, one of which raises his insurance thousands every year), so I offered to help him get new quotes. He doesn't balance his checkbook so he's having problems knowing how much money he has in the bank, complicated by the fact that he only uses a debit card which recently started to put a hold on much more than what he actually purchases (new rules, thanks to Congress' recent financial legislation), and a plethora of other problems. He doesn't have a computer, which is one reason he has no idea what's in his bank account, so I offered to find him a laptop. Anyway, today was spent requesting insurance quotes and researching laptops. About halfway through the day I realized that the best solution would be to give him my old laptop (the Dell I bought last year about this time) and buy a new one for myself. There are a lot of things about this Dell that I truly dislike. The keys are too wide and flat, so my fingernails keep getting stuck in between, I hated switching from XP to Windows 7 at the time, but now I've upgraded everything so that doesn't matter anymore. The worst part is the screen. It glares like crazy, practically a mirror, reflecting everything so that I can't sit in bright lights, or outdoors, or in the van, or even in my RV with a window behind me without creating enormous eye strain. Anyway, none of these things will really matter to my brother, but to me, it's the whole computer experience. Unfortunately, computer manufacturers don't seem to take these things into account when you're trying to research them. I spent HOURS just trying to put a name to a matte, anti-glare screen, and a raised keyboard, then more hours realizing that these aren't things that manufacturers list as something you can easily find. I mean, if I wanted a computer with a particular amount of memory, or screen size, or RAM or other hardware features, no problem, but find to find the bits that actually comes in contact with the user? Almost impossible! Anyway, we went out in the afternoon trying to look at laptops, becoming more and more frustrated at not being able to find what I wanted. By the end of the day we were no further along, except to eliminate a bunch of stores and a number of laptop brands. Busy, but unproductive, day.