I’m back – mostly. My laptop deserted me and it’s taken a few days to put things back together. As a “getting back to the blog” event, I’ll share my blunders and leave it to you to pick the lessons from it.

In my advancing age, I’ve become a cheap-o in some regards. Certainly not for everything – not firearms, or radios, or hand tools. But with personal computing devices, I’m just overwhelmed with all of the mumbo-jumbo-technical stuff and it overloads my ability to weigh actual value. And if you haven’t noticed, most everything but guns and hand tools are personal computing devices.

I’ve evolved a ground rule: You’ll likely be disappointed with any choice, so don’t spend more money than you’re willing to pay for the wisdom born of regret. This sent me down the Amazon trail of refurbished laptops. Refurbished = other folk’s regrets.

Found a great deal on a refurbished Lenovo ThinkPad. Drug it to many parks for FT8 until the touch screen quit working. Took about a year. It now sits in my closet. In my wisdom, I went with another ThinkPad, sans the touch screen. I ran a few months then it quit recognizing its own battery. On startup, it’d flash low battery then shut down. Undeterred, I homebrewed a power cable for 12 VDC and used it with a LiPo battery. Back to the parks!

Two weeks ago, it quit starting at all.

AB5MC, Michael Coffman, has been whispering in my ear, “Surface Pro” for several months. Full disclosure, he’s never said a word, but he’s really savvy on the techie-computery side of Amateur Radio and I have tremendous respect for his gear choices. He packs a Surface Pro for radio stuff, so there ya go.

I ordered a refurbished Surface Pro on Amazon and it showed up without a keyboard or charging thingy (some dudes never learn). I did the return waltz with Amazon and the UPS Store then ordered another that clearly listed “Keyboard” in the description. Soo…wait a few more days.

In the meantime, genius that I am, I pulled the battery from the failed laptop, looked at it, plugged it back in, and everything fired up like normal.

By this time, I’d already set my expectations on the Surface Pro and here I sit, pecking at its tiny keyboard. Its size is a bit like the KX2 – you can read the descriptions, you know it’s small, but it’s not really evident until you’re holding it in your hand. It’s just a tablet with a keyboard. I’m not complaining: I hear there’s starving kids in Africa who don’t have laptops at all.

As always,

TNX ES 73
KA5TXN
DitWit