Wednesday 29 September 2010

New Computer

I finally had to admit defeat. The new PC that Tim from Whaley Bridge, had built for me was fast but still had the same faults that had caused me to buy a new pc in the first case - programs crashing and hanging for no good reason. Tim tried very hard but it appeared to be the configuration that I needed to run caused the problems. Lots of Adobe programs, as well as Microsoft Outlook and Excel, gave problems with the Windows 7 machine. They took it back 2 or 3 times to try and fix but each time it was no better. In frustration I asked Tim to take it back - permanently, which he did. I don't think it is anything Tim did that caused the problems since they were the same ones I had on the old pc and they spent hours changing hardware and reloading software all to no avail. Looks more like Microsoft and Adobe incompatibilities. That left me with my old problem-ridden pc for the last 3 weeks. I decided to approach the problem from the other side and went for a chat with Andy, the resident computer man at Bob Rigby Photographic, my closest and best pro photographic dealer just 5 miles away in Bollington. After an hour or two I was convinced I should switch to Mac computers from Windows. Just the £1400 later I'm busy trying to set it up. Jolly clear screen. Will continue to run the ailing pc for my Microsoft Office programs for the time being, although I could run on the Mac if need be.

Fortunately, Tim set up a network drive for me, a raid system for auto backups, and that means I can access the same files and images from the 2 computers. I just have Lightroom 3 image editing software to use at the moment. I had bought the Photoshop CS5 upgrade for the new windows pc but am now working my way through the Adobe system for swapping from one platform to another. Hope they sort it for me soon as I rely so much on Photoshop.

I loaded Vuescan to run my Nikon 9000 film scanner and will try running that soon. This was the software that I had to use on the new pc as Nikon no longer support new software, like Windows 7, or Mac for that matter.

Fingers crossed I'm back in action. In the meantime there are 14 new images on the web site of Hamburg and Stockholm, scanned about a month ago on the new pc.

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