Well, I have my hard drive (HDD) replaced with a shiny new one, and Windows 7 installed and running. I’m almost finished installing all my favorite tools:

• Scrivener for large creative projects.

• WriteMonkey for writing text.

• LibreOffice for professional – commercial – needs. (I haven’t decided about Microsoft Office yet.)

• Dropbox.

• Evernote.

• Adobe Pro.

• Chrome for the Web.

• Miscellaneous antivirus and system tools.

I was very pleased that the OS installation took only about 20 minutes. My 2009 upgrade from Vista to 7 took at least an hour. And I remember installs of XP taking a lot longer than that. I once had to re-install 95, and it took half the night.

My first PC ran Windows 95 and the HDD was 6gb. My new disc is a terabyte – 1000gb – and I have another 1tb external drive. So here I have 333.3 times as much capacity. That’s something, huh? Progress … you gotta love it. Because we’ve all got a lot of stuff.

Ironically, I don’t think I’ll be storing much on the drive. I have about 80gb of music and podcasts I need to sync with the iPod, but everything else is in The Cloud now. I just think it’s funny that as we’re getting bigger drives for ourselves, we’re learning that keeping our files in a central location online just makes more sense.

I remarked to my family today that this might be the last monster of a desktop PC I need to have. The format of computers is changing drastically. I recently wrote a poem using Google Drive on my iPhone. I write rough drafts with my Nexus 7 pretty often now. … It’s a brave new weird.