Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

I spent around eight hours today working on getting the new computer to work. First I needed to copy all of the documents from the old machine onto and outboard drive. That took several hours by itself. Then I actually started up the new machine. After a bunch of initial stuff, the machine started downloading Windows updates. This took more than an hour to download and maybe another 30 minutes to install. The good part is that it did manage to transfer most of my settings from the previous machine. Moving my files back onto the new machine only took about fifteen minutes. (That 5TB Buffalo outboard drive is clearly a slow-write/fast-read box).

The rest of the afternoon consisted of the tedium of downloading some bits of software and reinstalling them. It was much slower than it should have been. Eventually I realized that the Ethernet through the USB hub was much too slow. I have a 200 mbps download speed from Spectrum, but this connection was less than 5, and usually only about 2. This being a new computer, it didn't have a built-in Ethernet port; you have to get the connection through a USB hub.

I connected another USB hub with an Ethernet port, and that ended up working just fine. I connected the secondary hub to one of the USB-C ports in the primary hub, and got the same speed as if I'd connected that hub directly to the computer. I conclude that the problem is with the Ethernet port in the original hub. I never used that port because there was a bug in the Dell that is being retired whereby it wouldn't recognize the Ethernet port in the hub at all (although all of the other things in the hub were fine). This was never an issue because the Dell had a built-in Ethernet port.

Not everything is working. We have a 15 TB network drive in our wiring closet, accessible via the home wired network. I was able to download the drive-management software (after fixing the network issue), and it detected the 15 TB drive, but it won't let me map it as a network drive, even after downloading and installing a firmware upgrade. I expect that I'll eventually figure out what's wrong, but after all of this time fussing with the computer and at least getting it to where I can get my email and run Quicken, I'm not up to any more fighting with it.

Those of you who say a complete update or replacement of your computer takes less than an hour: I'm happy for you. But I'm not one of those people.