08-22-16 pt. 2  nine. freaking. hours
August 22, 2016, round two

I got all splurgy yesterday, and purchased a new laptop. There wasn't really anything, to speak of, that was wrong with my current one. Other than the fact that it was slow, and about five years old, and it was always problematic because it was 64-bit. And that I noticed I've been having to do a lot of hard re-boots on it lately. But it certainly wasn't a case of dire urgency.

So I swallowed my antipathy towards Windows 10, and bought a new HP Pavilion. 15.6-inch High-Def touch screen, Intel Core i5 processor, 8 gigs of ram, 1 terrabyte hard drive, number keypad, 2 USB 2.0 and a 3.0, SD card slot, DVD-RW optical drive, and an HDMI output, and in short, pretty much everything I wanted (except for a backlit keyboard and a non-shit OS) and not much that I didn't. At a decent price--$429.00. (Best Buy's anniversary sale).

All this actually started when we went to Costco on Saturday. Spouse decided to go through and look at the laptops they had in for back-to-school, and we found a nice HP that was $499. Very similarly tricked out to the one I ended up getting, but it was a 2-in-1, a feature which I wasn't really interested in, and it had no buttons on the touchpad, which is something I find annoying. They had a couple that seemed possible, but annoyingly, Costco doesn't provide the specs for them on the counter. So I noted the model numbers of a couple of the laptops they had on display, and figured I'd go home and look them up.

When I did, I found that the $399.00 one was a dog, and so I settled on the $499.00 model. Then Spouse found the one at Best Buy, so we said we'd go look at it on Sunday.

Well, I looked at it, liked it, liked the price, bought it, and we were on our way in about 15 minutes. Stopped at the store for a couple of things, and headed home. 

After taking care of a few chores, I popped it out of the box, plugged it in, and fired it up, and began working on my setup. Set some defaults, deleted some bloatware, and then opened "Edge" (IE), and went to do those first key things: Download Chrome and set it as the default browser, and set my new baby up under my Avast account so it was all protected.

Those three things took NINE HOURS.  I have no freaking clue, STILL, what the hell it is about that Edge browser that wouldn't let me do download or install anything, but I tried everything that I, Spouse, and the whole damned internet could think of, and nothing worked.

With the exception of the time it took to make, eat, and clean up after dinner, and to fold & put away a basket of socks & underwear--I busted my ass trying to get it to let me download what I needed. It wouldn't even let me set up the free McAfee trial it came with! And at this point, I still didn't even know if it was Windows 10, or that stinko browser!

Finally, with bedtime looming, I decided to stick a thumb-drive in my old machine and copy the Chrome files, and transfer them to the new one that way. 

And it worked!  Sort of. 
I was able to use Chrome, and I was able to get my Avast up and running. But when I tried to set Chrome as my default, the system wasn't picking it up. So I looked at a couple of other options for default apps, figured out what folder they were in, and put a copy of the chrome folder in that location.

SUCCESS. At last. And just in time to go to bed.

And I never again want to lay eyes on that festering pile of dog-vomit called "Edge" , for as long as I live.