12-17 Technology Update

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned we had gotten a new Nexus 7 Tablet, Larry now has everything working the way he wants and is very happy with it. Now what to do with the old slow and buggy tablet.

New Tablet

Old Tablet

A bit over three years ago Larry wanted to get a tablet, he had done a lot of studying on them and came to the conclusion he wanted a 7 inch tablet with the latest version of Android, HDMI, GPS and a SD card slot. He was not sure he needed all of this, heck he wasn't even sure he needed a tablet. He was hoping to use it a bit when we travel and he hoped to replace our stand alone GPS navigation unit with it. At the time a name brand tablet that offered what he wanted was more money than he wanted to pay. During his research he found a inexpensive Chinese tablet that offered everything he wanted and got really good reviews but other than forums there would be no support. He went ahead and ordered one. We have used this table all these years, it did replace our GPS and we learned so much about tablets. They are wonderful but they do not replace a computer. We have taken a week long trip where we only took that tablet along and while we were able to do everything we wanted it would have been easier with a computer. A couple of years ago the tablet starting acting strange, at the time it was really slow, sometimes it crashed. Larry decided to reload it, he found a process to get the tablet to reset and load itself to the factory defaults. When it rebooted it came up in Chinese, everything was in Chinese, all the icons and even the keyboard, he had no idea how to get it to English and since all of the menus were in Chinese he had no idea what to choose. Luckily he found another person on a forum who had done the same thing and someone had replied back with the steps to get it back into English. Well the other day he decided to reload it again and see if  some of the slowness and buggy rebooting problems might go away, fortunately he had printed out those directions on getting it into English and stored them in the original tablet box, sure enough he reset it and it came up in Chinese. He now has it working again with the apps he wants and it seems to be stable, while it is not very fast nor is the display up to today's standards it will make a good backup tablet. It also will not run the newer versions of the GPS app we use, a year or so back they updated the app and it would no longer work. he contacted the company and they sent him the older version, he still has that and loaded it back on. He loves doing things like this.

When was the last time you played a board game, card game or any other games. Well, this evening we went over to Dee's house and played Yahtzee with her and Belinda. Earlier this afternoon Belinda called and asked if we wanted to go over to Dee's house and play some games, Larry said sure. We were there for a few hours and had fun playing Yahtzee and visiting with them.