My wife, son and I used to share an office on the second floor of our house. It’s a big room, one of the huge selling features when we bought it, as we have our master bedroom, decent sized-room for Jacob, a smallish guest room, and then this big 15’x15′ room over the garage. We had three desks in it, one for each of us, lots of office supplies, printers, charging stations, etc. But Jacob’s computer was pretty basic.

And when we started our COVID time at home, it became increasingly clear really fast that Jacob was either going to be spending a lot of time in our shared office while we were trying to work, or he would need something more portable to work on around the house. So we bought him a decent laptop, capable of gaming even. Which he took to like a duck to water and never looked back. With the exception of the colour printer, he has no real need to use his office computer, or even his desk, as we have a new desk setup for the first floor for him. Yet a lot of his files were still on that office PC.

Today, I decided it was time to “cut the cord” and move all his files to his laptop. We had been initially thinking he would use both computers from time to time but the office is really just Andrea’s office now, while he takes the first floor and I’m in the basement.

He still had a couple of games that hadn’t moved yet, a bunch of school files, some writing that he’s done, some pictures here and there, a bit of data, enough to keep me busy for a little while. One of the games runs out of a single directory (not really installed, just boots from the drive), and I have NO idea where it saves one of the data elements. But the rest of it transferred fine.

I even set him up with a bit of a file structure in MY DOCUMENTS, and he’s good to go. I haven’t decided if I will move his old computer out of the office, but I know how annoying it can be to try and maintain two sets of files and work on two different machines…he has even emailed himself files a couple of times when they were in the wrong place. Not a serious problem, just annoying, and if it was me, I would want them moved. I asked, he agreed, so consolidated they were!

Unfortunately, for some reason, the colour printer does NOT want to print from his laptop which is connected wirelessly to the LAN. The printer is wired to the LAN, and I even tried reconnecting it higher in the router structure, but his laptop just cannot see it. I thought it was the same problem Andrea’s computer was having earlier with photos, but doesn’t seem to be. I’ll try one more time tomorrow, see if I get any farther.

Otherwise, it is all good. He even synched his iPhone with it to back up all his photos and videos onto the machine. Slow as molasses over wireless, but it worked. Soon I’ll have to do a full backup onto a portable drive plus tothe cloud. Onward!

Today I choose to consolidate Jacob’s files for him on to his laptop so they’re all in one place.

What choices are you making today?