While browsing a Best Buy flyer a little while ago, I came upon a good deal for a white, 14 inch Toshiba laptop with Windows 8. I already have a 15 inch, with Windows XP, purchased in 2009. I actually paid to downgrade to XP as Vista still had bugs at the time. I meant to update the silver-coloured laptop until Windows 8 came along making that next to impossible. Once the message came up XP no longer had any technical support, I decided to uninstall the wireless drivers, and make it the writing laptop. I already used my white, Windows 8 laptop anyway for internet and of course doing this blog among other things.
The silver Toshiba still works. I took good care of it and the thing runs Office 2010. I don’t like the idea of getting rid of something. I have a blow dryer that just died, and I am looking for a place in Winnipeg that will take it and recycle it. It must have part someone can use. I feel the same way about the laptop. It runs well, and I can stick a flash drive in to save my work, then plug it in the other laptop. Remember when transitioning from Word 2003 to 2007 some small program needed to get downloaded to read files? Not anymore.
I didn’t know George R.R. Martin already had a similar idea taken one step further:
Will this approach help me write the great, Canadian, fantasy/literary/young adult/memoir/novel? It doesn’t matter anyway as it still takes someone sitting down to write the thing, no matter the operating system on a computer.
Unpaused Life 
I think it’s hilarious that writing a novel in WordStar is now taken as a depth of low tech writing — because I know people who are still writing at least first drafts by hand. I remember thinking, when I used WordStar the first time, what a gain it was over what I had been doing previously — typing my papers, or when I had access to it, using Scripsit on my parents’ TRS-80 model 3.
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Soon after you mentioned ‘typing’ I had to look up an image of a Brother AX 15 typewriter. I used that to type up my papers, and other sundry stuff.
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I don’t remember the model typewriter I had — it was a birthday present when I was sixteen, though …
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When I first joined the workplace as a teaching assistant back in the early 80s, I had to learn how to use an brand new Apple computer with those truly ‘floppy’ discs. I was so clueless as to how they worked that, even though I’d been shown how to copy files from one floppy to another, I ended up erasing the original! I have become a little more tech savvy than I was then, but I sometimes think that simpler is better. 🙂
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