Beware of Geeks Bearing Gifts

My laptop has been slowly dying. The graphics card has gotten so hot in the past that it literally unsoldered itself from the motherboard. Luckily, at that time I had an extended warranty - a week or so and I had a new computer.
This past Sunday it would no longer boot. A B.S.O.D. (Blue Screen Of Death) every time.

After admitting to myself the trouble was beyond my capabilities, I went to secure a new computer.
By Tuesday I had to be up and running. I could not wait for Labor Day sales...pity.

I ran to Best Buy and started my search. They had a dozen desktop computers. I quickly narrowed it down to two. While money was being transferred electronically, I picked up the box of the last remaining example of either model and checked out.

Boy, this thing is fast...Huge too, more storage than I'll ever use - I said that about a twenty megabyte hard drive in the 1980s; yeah, that didn't last.

But then came the task of transferring all that data. Pictures, music (11,000 mp3s), et cetera. I was looking at quite a task.
I began by opening DropBox; cloud based storage - 2gb is free.
To rent 50gb of storage is $9.99 a month or $99 a year in advance..A 100 gb is $19.99/199.00.

At 2 gb a shot, it was going to take a long, long time.
By Thursday I began to think about how much bandwidth was being eaten by these 2gb swaps going on twelve hours a day (2gb up from the laptop and then 2gb down to the new computer).
Ah, but that made me think of an 8gb sd card I recently bought!

Plug it in to the old computer (which I got to boot, somewhat stable, but no graphics) grab 8gb of data at a time and then insert the card into the new computer. Inside of a few hours I had cleaned a major portion of the old computer - with no bandwidth consumed.

Each time we upgrade - a new smartphone, a new computer; we also inherit the task of setting all the attendant parts of our digital lives. The email accounts, The bank logins. Cloud storage, file hosting...on and on...
And with each day we are establishing new accounts for new purposes. FaceBook, FourSquare, Tripit...
So that with every new device, the time to be "up and running" is  growing longer and the improved technology barely keeps pace.

I'm a geek, but I have been bitten upon the ass by Technology.