Update for Friday, May 14, 2021, or: The Saga of the Wayward Laptop Ends!

Hello (again), Dear Reader. It’s now mid-afternoon here in New Hometown, Florida on Friday, May 14, 2021. It’s almost summer-hot outside; the temperature having reached its forecast high of 85˚F (30˚C). I won’t bother with a complete run-down of the weather here; this is just a quick little update to let you know that the Saga of the Wayward Laptop has reached a happy conclusion.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, 13 days after I went to Best Buy to order a replacement for my now-defunct Compaq/HP laptop,[1] my Lenovo IdeaPad S340 finally arrived.

To be more precise, this is not the laptop I ordered on May 1. That machine somehow got lost and never got past the “We made a shipping label” stage at UPS. How it got lost is beyond me; the laptop itself is small and light, but the outer packaging? Not so much. It’s not a heavy package, but it isn’t tiny. The box had to accommodate a computer that is 14.09 inches wide, 9.65 inches deep, and 0.7 inches high and the packing material used to cushion it during its portage from New York State to New Hometown.

It’s. Not. A. Tiny. Box.

I could theorize all day about what happened to Shipment #2 (as Best Buy refers to the Wayward Laptop); it might have been forgotten in some corner of a warehouse before UPS “initiated” the shipping process by a careless employee, or it might have  proved too much of a temptation for someone – either at Best Buy, the Postal Service, or UPS – to resist and was stolen by a shady employee. Your guess is as good as mine, Dear Reader. The end result was the same, though; the laptop I ordered on May 1 never arrived, and Best Buy – to its credit – sent me a replacement pronto.

And that replacement, folks, is right here. In my humble abode. I’m charging the battery up as I write this update.

I really can’t write too much about the  Lenovo – IdeaPad S340 right now. I took it out of its shipping box and did the basic setup stuff already – you know, like setting a PIN and synching it to my Microsoft account. I tried registering it with Lenovo, but the company servers are down for maintenance, so that little chore will need to wait a few days.

The weirdest feature I noticed is that Cortana – Microsoft’s answer to Siri – talks in a feminine voice. Also, when my laptop booted up, the first word I saw on the screen was “Hi.”

Since the battery is not fully charged yet I have not been able to do anything beyond the very basics of the set up process. It is larger than the ThinkPad I have as a last-resort backup, which is why I bought the  Lenovo – IdeaPad S340 in the first place, and it is sturdy. So the next time I use it – which should be soon – I will download my Norton Antivirus protection software so I don’t have subscribe to another antivirus program (say, McAffee).

Anyway, I just wanted to let you all know that the Saga of the Wayward Laptop is officially over. I’ll be back tomorrow with other content that isn’t as nerve-racking!

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[1] I bought it in 2009, a few months before my mom’s health took its long and fatal downturn, when I still lived in Miami. It was supposed to be a backup to my now-equally defunct Compaq desktop PC, but when I had to move downstairs to take care of my ailing mother, the laptop became my principal computer because it was portable and I could even work in my mother’s room so she would feel safe and happy that I was with her. It wasn’t until late 2014 that I bought this Lenovo all-in-one because it is more powerful and has all of the features of a mid-2010s PC but combines all of the elements (hard drive, motherboard, DVD-ROM drive, etc.) in a single piece – hence the name “Lenovo All-in-One.” Because the all-in-one became my main PC once I moved here, my Compaq laptop was rarely – if ever – used here in New Hometown. That’s why I was so surprised a few weeks ago to see that it was on its last legs. It was working fine the last time I used it in 2016; by the time I decided to see if I could access my old Epinions reviews that were stored in the laptop’s hard drive, Windows Vista was no longer supported by Microsoft, and it only worked on safe mode. RIP, HP/Compaq laptop. You served me well!