A new midrange laptop for me and what I use for specific jobs

Some people may think that three laptops that I have are too many, but, I don't.  I have machines for specific tasks.  The netbook is an old machine that I bought years ago on sale and the HP is a refurbished model.  The Dell machine is the only new laptop and I bought it specifically for gaming and to store a lot of digital images.
 

Netbook:

I have the netbook set up with LUBUNTU.  That is great distro for a five year old netbook with 2 gigs of memory.  It allows me access to web mail, Facebook, Twitter and a few other things when I travel and it is very light and the battery lasts about 4-6 hours depending on what I am doing which is great when traveling.  If I am doing light digital editing it isn't to bad, a bit slow, but usable. 

HP Laptop

I picked up a nice mid-range laptop for my every day work at home.  It is a HP EliteBook 8440P.  Eight gigs of memory and one hundred and twenty-eight gig SSD.  I originally had LUBUNTU, but, something in how I did and configured caused the screen to go 'nuts' at times.  I put on PCLINUXOS and it has been rock solid.  This machine is my daily machine rather than my high end gaming system.  It allows ready access to social media (Facebook and Twitter), email and light gaming.  It also is used for digital editing and other daily work.

PCLINUXOS installed a lot of software I don't need and it was easy to remove them. I like the distro and I used it years ago and I see it has gotten better over time.  The desktop is KDE and it is close enough to Windows that anyone accustomed to Windows (up to 7) will be at home using it.  It is light enough on system resources that it is snappier than windows.  As an example this laptop launches in about thirty seconds (including the time for my to type in my password) and shuts down in about five seconds.  My gaming system takes about a minute to launch and about two minutes to shut down.

I am now playing Old School Runescape on the machine and it is as fast in a browser as when I am using my gaming system with the Runescape client software.

Todo

• I transferred my various Bash scripts from the netbook here, but, I had to make minor tweaks due to the difference in terminals and the options used to compile Bash.  My next mini-project will be to look at the scripts and figure out how to rewrite them so that run on both systems without changes.
• Set up and configure the Brother network printer.
• Set up and configure the old scanner to work on this machine.
• Install and configure additional software to play DVD movies.

Dell Gaming system

My high end machine is a Dell.  Right now it is running Windows 10.  I use this for heavy duty gaming and software that runs only on windows (income tax).  This machine has eight gigs of memory and a one terabyte drive.  This is my main machine for all of my digital photos and scanned documents.  Anything I do on the HP for digital images gets transferred here and once a month the files are backed up to an external one terabyte drive.

Another campaign with virus/trojan laden emails

For the last couple of days I have been receiving a number of emails with file attachments.  They are from people I don't know and claiming I have unpaid invoices or they are coming from me with file attachments.  It doesn't matter, when I get email from unknown people with attachments I never open them.  When they are from me I know exactly every note I send myself and I don't open something I don't remember sending.  I checked a number of sites with the note information and found that they are full of nasty programs that will take over your computer.

Notes:

• If you get email with an attachment from someone you don't know never indulge your curiosity by reading the file, delete the email, empty the trash.
• If you get email from someone you know, but, are not expecting contact them first and verify that they actually sent the email.  Don't use any links inside, use your own contact list.  If they didn't send it, delete immediately and empty the trash.
• If you get email that claims to be you and you don't remember sending it, delete immediately and empty the trash.

 

My ISP flagged them as SPAM.

Example text of their claiming you owe them money.  Actually trojan laden attachment.

Double check your email address when registering anything

Looks like someone down in Florida bought a new cellphone.  How do I know?  As part of the registration they supplied an email address so they can get notifications, like their PIN number.  The problem is they used my account name and I got the notification of the cell phone number, plan information, PIN number, name, address.  I called Virgin Mobile USA and explained things and they started the process of trying to contact the customer, change the email address and lock the account from using my email account.  The person at the other end was very nice, professional and friendly and customer service is why I like Virgin Mobile.

This isn't the first time that something like this happened.  A couple of years ago I got a rather nasty, profane email from a woman in Ireland who thought she was venting at her ex.

For the Virgin Mobile phone I logged into the account as I wanted to make sure that I wasn't a victim of identity theft and they were using my credit card for their phone.  Fortunately it appears that I wasn't.

The thing is that when you register anything and they ask you for an email account make sure that you provide the correct one or someone else could be getting email that you don't want anyone else to get.

Main login

Checking to see if my Credit Card was used