Tales of the Obsolete...

My cheap, er, frugal nature has been battling my spendthrift nature (spendthrift usually wins) and we'll see how the battle of the Titans goes.

The cause of all this strife is my Klic-N-Kut cutter plotter. It entered my life last December and I've shown off what I can make with it, but I want to be able to take it with me for craft days. That, however, would require a laptop, which I didn't have (well, not really).

You see, I wasn't really counting the Toshiba Satellite my Dad gave me last Christmas. After all, it's a Pentium II with only 32 MB of memory and an "Enormous 4.1 Billion byte hard drive" (yes, that's 4 GB...I have thumbdrives with more capacity) It was a screamer when Dad bought it...in '99. And he kinda neglected to give me a power cord. Did I mention the battery is dead? Anyway, the real kicker is that KNK Studio, the software for my new toy, won't run on '98...gotta be XP at the minimum.

Soooooo, I set my sights on a 'real' laptop and saved up my money. But every time I found what I wanted, there was an unexpected expense that ate just enough of my funds that it was out of reach. Realizing that Murphy was playing with me (I'm Murphy's poster child...don't get behind me in line...ANYWHERE!), I reassessed my options.

In my stash of semi-obsolete computer bits and pieces I found an IBM laptop power source that worked with the old Toshiba. I got my Windows XP disk out and checked the laptop's resources. Rats, XP requires a minimum of 64MB of memory. A quick trip to TigerDirect.com actually turned up the correct laptop memory to max it out (160 MB, be still my heart) and it arrived today. I couldn't wait till 5:30 to hotfoot it home. Stopped off on the way to pick up a USB hub because this dino only has the one USB port and the KNK uses a USB to communicate as well as a USB dongle to unlock the software.

Install memory. Check.
Run XP pre-check. Check.
Result - Barely dooable. So I started the upgrade and crossed my fingers.
An hour later...we got's XP! Woot!

Couldn't wait to share progress so far (AND it's getting late!) so I'll let everyone know soonest if the poor old thing can run the KNK.