new computers

So the boss put two new Lenovo computers in the foreign teachers’ office, because now there’s six of us in this programme, and the two old ones were not enough. That’s pretty cool, although I always was happy to bring my laptop over, and two new computers meant I lost the desk I had claimed.

Anyway, the trouble is that these two new ones have nothing but a very basic XP set-up. No Office, which is a hassle considering the computers are here for us to work on. So a couple of days ago I found myself here in the office with more lunchbreak than I had planned, having eaten faster than I realised, and so I thought, well, that old IBM is so riddled with viruses, spyware, and other kinds of electronic nasties it’s all but unuseable, so why not plug one of the cool, new Lenovo’s in to the internet instead? And so I did, and it worked (although Explorer was predictably painfully slow), and then I thought, why not get this thing set up so that it’s reasonably well protected? And so I downloaded Firefox and AVG anti-virus and anti-spyware, and got them set up. Then I noticed Mozilla has some stand-alone calendar application called Sunbird under development, but apparently good enough to be released in a not-yet-perfected form, so I thought, that might be useful, and downloaded that and set it up. Then I was thinking, well, it’s still not much use for working on without Office, but that costs money, oh, wait, there’s Open Office- why not give that a go? But I was running out of time, so I left that until today when I have some space in the morning. So I just downloaded that, and when MSN Messenger (necessary for chatting with lzh) is done downloading, I’ll get off line and set it up and see how useful it is. It claims to work with Microsoft Office, so hopefully when I put work stuff I’ve got on my laptop onto this computer, it’ll still be useable and I’ll be able to continue doing work here. Of course, Messenger being a Microsoft product, it’s taking a hell of a long time to download.

And I thought, well, this is a public, open computer in the office, so I set Firefox to delete cookies and personal information as soon as it is closed and to never remember things like passwords (which I’m not comfortable with any software doing, anyway). Maybe that’s a bit excessively paranoid, but I’d prefer to keep my privacy as well preserved as possible.

Not that anybody ever really uses this office. I use it as much for storage as anything else, and I like having a space away from home to work in. There are two others who pop in and out and use this space for storing work stuff or occasionally working or studying Chinese, but the others generally only pop in and out every now and then.

Still waiting for that bloody Messenger….

But you know, this office is kinda quiet. Maybe I should bring some music in and put it on the computer.

About the Author

wangbo

A Kiwi teaching English to oil workers in Beijing, studying Chinese in my spare time, married to a beautiful Beijing lass, consuming vast quantities of green tea (usually Xihu Longjing/西湖龙井, if that means anything to you), eating good food (except for when I cook), missing good Kiwi ale, breathing smog, generally living as best I can outside Godzone and having a good time of it.

You may also like these