Karen, I started out with a Dell desktop with a 17 inch monitor. It was on the desk in my hubby's smoking room as that was the only place that we had for it. It took up so much space. When in 2006, I broke both of my feet, I could not use the computer as I was confined to bed for 8 months. Hubby bought me a Dell laptop at that time. It was a lemon but at least he bought the extra warranty on it. In the meantime, the hard drive went out on the desk top. One of my church members has his own computer business & he was able to retrieve all of my data off of the the desktop including my embroidery designs. When I got my new ASUS laptop last year, he was able to retrieve everything off of the Dell laptop so I haven't really lost any data whatsoever. The old desktop was donated to the church which gave us a tax write-off as was the Dell laptop & my daughter's first MacBook Pro which died within 3 yrs. Now, whenever, I have to spend time in bed, I have my laptop right next to me & can use it when I have to spend long periods on bedrest. I have a 1 Terabyte external hard drive to keep all of my documents backed up including embroidery designs. When I want to go sew with others or have a meeting, I can take my laptop (it has a built in wi-fi) with me & have access to my embroidery designs. When I'm hospitalized, I can keep everyone updated with what's happening. I love the portability of my laptop. I have plenty of memory space & it doesn't take up much room. I use a thumb drive to transfer my embroidery designs to my machine. Therefore, I can lie down on the bed, work with my Embird software to manipulate the designs, & then put the final design on my thumb drive. Go to my machines & sew. With an external floppy drive, I can access all of my floppy designs so nothing has been lost & everything is backed up in more than one format.
Marty

Brighten each corner where you are ... smile!