New Netbook

I have been looking around for a new laptop to replace the one I bought five years ago. I wanted a 14″ or 15″ screen, over 4 GB of memory, Intel’s new Haswell processor, and a 6-cell battery, which combined with the efficient Haswell, should give me a lot of run time from the battery. I found a really nice HP for $399 (recently $349) at Best Buy that had 4 GB of memory, but could be upgraded to 8 GB, but the HP has a 17-inch screen and weighed over 6 lbs, making it bulky and pretty heavy.

Office Depot had a little netbook type of thing, called an Asus Transformer T100. While it runs Windows 8.1, it has only 2 GB of memory, internal storage of only 32 GB, and has an Intel Atom processor. It has a small 10-inch screen, no DVD drive, and weighs just over 2 pounds. It has a Micro SD slot (no room for a full-size SD card) and I thought I could double the storage by getting a 32 GB card at Fry’s for $18. It even comes with a basic version of Microsoft Office, all for $329. The “Transformer” part comes in because you can remove the keyboard and have a touchscreen tablet. All the keyboard does is give you a USB 3.0 port (plus keyboard and touchpad). So I was deciding whether to go with the big 17″ laptop, the tiny netbook, or wait for a 15″ laptop like I wanted. I decided on getting the netbook thing. I liked the idea of an iPad size Windows computer. Maybe eventually I will get a bigger laptop as a replacement for my desktop computer.

I’m typing on the Transformer right now. I will post a review after I play around with it for a few days.

2014 Roth

I posted a comment as a follow-up to last year’s Roth IRA purchase. With the stock market up 30% in 2013, I am a little nervous about a correction in 2014, but one area that didn’t do well at all was emerging markets, which lost money, and international stocks in general didn’t do nearly as well as the US market. In 2003, I was going to sell the shares of Janus Overseas because of changes in management, but instead just sold half the shares and used the proceeds to buy shares in Fidelity Diversified International. From then on Janus outperformed Fidelity just about every year and I regretted the decision to reduce my position in Janus. Since the shares in FDIVX are the only ones I have left in my non-IRA Fidelity account, I thought I might sell that position and use it for my IRA purchase.
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The McCords

Mom’s grandmother’s maiden name was Velma McCord, who was born in Corinth in the northern part of Mississippi in 1881. Her father was Rufus Chapman McCord who was born near Moulton, in the northern part of Alabama. There were a bunch of McCords around Moulton, but they seem to have left, many moving to Corinth, but others going to Tennessee. I’m not sure what the draw to Corinth was, but there was another family of McCords there as well which may be unrelated or at best distantly related. Rufus’ father was William J. McCord who lived in Moulton for a while, but was born in Tennessee. He had a family bible, which like many family bibles, was used to write down important family information like births, marriages, and deaths.

William really took this seriously, or at least people in his family did. The text of what was written can be found on web pages here and here, part of a project by a McCord now living in Georgia to put all of the McCord bible information in one place. William McCord’s bible is a treasure trove of information. Some of this information is available through public records like the census, marriage licenses, death certificates, etc. as well as some gravestones that have been indexed, but this is a ton of information about the family all in one place and very complete. And it is pretty accurate as well, confirmed with some of that other information when it is available.
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Desktop Repair

My desktop computer, a very old Dell Dimension 4700, bought in April 2005, has started having problems lately. Last year I had installed a new hard drive and rebuilt the operating system, which worked great for a while, but sometimes lately it wouldn’t start at all. Instead, while booting, it would click off and an orange light on the front would start flashing. I looked around on the internet and the light seemed to usually indicate a bad power supply. But it was an intermittent problem, so I opened the computer and tried blowing out a lot of dust and cleaning dust out of the vents and fans. Then it would work, but I would still have problems sometimes. If it did start up, it would usually stay on just fine. I even unhooked one of the two optical drives and one of the two hard drives, thinking I needed to reduce the power consumption.

By Friday I couldn’t boot up at all. I would get the orange light pretty early in the process no matter how much I cleaned it. I had never replaced a power supply before, but Eric said he had done it and it was pretty easy. Plus they are almost all the same. He wound up taking the power supply out of his computer so I could test a known good power supply in my computer. It booted up just fine with Eric’s power supply on Saturday, so that was definitely the problem. I took my power supply apart and blew some more dust out of it and then tried again, just to be sure, and it still didn’t work. Eric said a new power supply should be about $20 and I could get one from NewEgg.com. I looked around and you can get a power supply for anywhere from $13 to $160. They typical price seems to be around $40-60. The original power supply was only 305 watts, so I didn’t need a high power model. I looked at New Egg, Amazon, Office Depot, and Frys online, and decided to go to Frys so I could get one and have it this weekend. They had one for $25 before a $9 rebate. I probably spent another $5 in gas going up to Frys, but it was worth it to get it right away. The new power supply is much lighter than the old one, but fit perfectly and the computer is running like a champ. Due to the configuration of the cables on the power supply I wasn’t able to hook up both DVD drives, but that’s okay. And the new one is much louder than the old one as well.

I am still thinking I would like a new computer, but I’m waiting for a good price on a notebook that has the new 4th generation Intel processor (Haswell). My thought is the notebook will replace the desktop and laptop, so I also want it to support two monitors. The power consumption of desktop computers made me think they are no longer necessary.

Genealogy Research

For some reason I got the genealogy bug and I have been doing a lot of research the last couple of weeks. I want to get as much done as I can and then stop. It’s like putting together a puzzle, but I don’t want to make a career out of this puzzle.

I’ve been able to come up with a few different resources that have turned out to be pretty helpful and just want to list those.

One great resource is ancestry.com. A lot of people do genealogy and share their family trees there, plus they also have a ton of resources that are easy to look up. If you know a person’s name and the county they lived in, you should be able to find stuff out about them, which is pretty amazing considering a lot of the records are around 100 years old. You have to pay a monthly fee to use the best features of ancestry.com (some of it is free), but you can get a two-week trial which I am making good use of. And lately I am finding that familysearch.org’s Search feature (as opposed to its Find feature which is used to find people) is good for getting some of the same records as Ancestry has.
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