As you know, my Lenovo C560 All-in-One stopped working this weekend. There weren’t any telltale signs of impending failure on Saturday, which was the last day that I used it; that day, I switched it on almost as soon as I woke up in the morning, wrote my daily blog post, spent time on Facebook, Twitter, and WordPress, then turned it off for a bit to watch the first two parts of the HBO miniseries Chernobyl.
When I finished watching the two episodes of the 2019 docudrama about the April 1986 nuclear disaster that foreshadowed the fall of the Soviet Union, I tried to turn on the Lenovo C560 so I could play either Cold Waters or Armored Brigade, my current Cold War-goes-Hot computer games, for a while. And as I wrote in yesterday’s post, my computer was as dead as the proverbial doornail.
I have two Lenovo laptops – a small Think Pad that was the last computer I purchased in Miami when I still lived there, and a larger Idea Pad that I bought last year after my 12-year-old Compaq laptop crunched its last byte – that works just fine, so I can do much of the stuff I used to do on my C560 on them. However, they lack certain features – such as decent speakers and a DVD-RW drive – that I, the user, consider being essential.
I also find that using smaller laptops is more tiring for me than a desktop model. This has always been the case in my 35 years of using computers, especially over the past 13 years. I didn’t own a laptop until 2009, and I didn’t use that computer regularly until my mother got so sick that she was moved from the master bedroom upstairs to what used to be our guest room on the first floor of our two-story townhouse. I had a Hewlett Packard desktop PC in my bedroom/office upstairs, and though it was not new in 2010 it was not elderly, but once I became my mom’s primary caregiver, I could not spend much time upstairs. I had to be close to mom’s room for most of the day, so I set up my laptop on the dining room table and used it there as my primary PC for over four years.
Indeed, that’s why I purchased the Lenovo C560 in the first place. I needed a computer that had a large screen, an easier-to-use keyboard that did not have a touchpad behind it, and the power and speed of a “tower” PC without the “tower.” My good friend and fellow writer Leigh Egan suggested an all-in-one model, ideally with a touchscreen. I checked Amazon’s Lenovo Store to see if any were available for what I could afford. The model with a touchscreen was a bit above my price range, but the nearly identical C506 was available for $649.99.
I received my C560 in the first week of August 2014, less than a year before my mother died. Since then, it was in my office – formerly known as my mom’s bedroom – for the last few months of my residing in my old townhouse, and it was my main computer here in Lithia from April 2016 until its unexpected demise Saturday afternoon.
As I write this, my new Lenovo IdeaCentre AIO 3 AMD All-in-One Computer is at an Amazon facility in nearby Seffner. It will soon be put in a delivery van and marked as Out for Delivery, possibly within the hour. At any rate, it will arrive today before 10 PM – which is Amazon’s standard cutoff time for deliveries, but with a few exceptions, most of my Amazon-delivered packages arrive here by 6 PM.
For those of you who are techies, here are the specs per the Amazon product page:
| Personal computer design type | All in One |
| Specific Uses for Product | Multimedia, Personal, Business |
| Series | IdeaCentre AIO 3 24 |
| Ram Memory Installed Size | 16 GB |
| Operating System | Windows 11 |
| CPU Model | Ryzen 5 5500U |
| Brand | Lenovo |
| CPU Manufacturer | AMD |
| Screen Size | 23.8 Inches |
| Year | 2021 |
A Certain Point of View, Too 
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