Equipment Frustration

[mastamak]

This is not so much as a query, just a gentle rant about equipment frustration.

Frustration No 1.
My trusty old Canon 40D was no longer up to the job. After some encouragement from a friend I decided to let the moths out of the purse, so to speak, and upgrade to the new Canon 5D Mk111. What a great camera. The pictures are super sharp and at 25Mbytes or thereabouts so they should be. But, this soon led on to :

Frustration No 2
My old version of Photoshop was obviously struggling with the large file size. The solution came to me in a flash of insight - buy the latest version of Photoshop and while at it I might as well chuck in Lightroom too.

Frustration No 3
Lightroom will not work on my current computer. Apparently I did not read the fine print - only runs under Vista or higher, so no hopers like me who are still using Windows XP are not in the running; Solution upgrade to Windows 7

Frustration No 4
After upgrade, Lightroom, Bridge and Photoshop are all running so slow that I have time to brew a cup of coffee just waiting for the software to fire up. Solution buy a new computer. "No worries, mate" says my computer guy with a glint in his eye and several days later I am the proud owner of a quad core, a SSD & 1TB HDD & Windows 8 whatever that all means. I am also the owner, by this time, of a very sick credit card. My financial adviser says I will probably be OK if I put retirement off for a few more years.

Frustration No 5
The computer is wonderful. Everything runs superbly and Windows 8 seems to burrow into all my peripherals identifying them correctly, calibrating monitors, etc in the blink of an eye. But here is the final rub. I can't turn the rotten thing off. No amount of poking the power button will make the beast shut down. It literally laughs at my puny attempts to turn it off. Anyone else have this problem? Short of pulling the power cord, which seem a bit drastic I am at my wits ends. Mr Gates, are you out there! This is a cry from the heart of one of the many minions who made you the richest man in the world. Please come and turn my computer off.

Grant

[FrankMi]

Hi Grant, I'm still on Windows 7 but this looks like what you are looking for....

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57...windows-8-off/

[Mark von Kanel]

Grant, thanks for giving me the giggles! but from what i hear, your going to have nothing but trouble with windows 8 as its been designed with touch screen tablets and the like in mind. Others will be here to help im sure, But id be going to see you PC man to remove some of that glint by getting him to install win 7 for free!

[Donald]

And the moral of this tale, from a trusty old 40D user, is you should have nursed it gently back into life and given it your love! That would have saved you all this hassle.

And ............ because I was having so many problems getting the latest versions DxO Optics Pro to run I got a clean reinstall and, at the same time, moved from the dark ages of XP into the rarified atmosphere of Windows 7. Luckily (or maybe not) I'd been reading what people were saying about Windows 8 on here and thought that since I'm not generally in the front of the queue, I'd just go with 7 for now.

[tbob]

I thought this was heading toward you finding out that the wiring in your house was inadequate for the increased power draw of the new computer, then while upgrading the wiring you discovered rot in the walls.

[LeoLeo]

Grant,

Don't know that sort of license you get (W8), but IS most of time comaptible "down". I.E. license for Windows 8 will cover license for Windows 7, in most of cases.

Leo

[Glenn NK]

Truly a sad and disappointing tale.

1) I'm still using my 30D in addition to a 5DII; the 40D is a pretty good body, but a new camera is a thing of joy.

2) The files from a 5DII prompted me to upgrade to a quad core - I empathize with Grant on this one. My XP machine just died when I added the 5DII files - even with LR3.

3) Grant was suckered by the computer sales hack - I think that the sales hack could have been more honest - Win 8 is considered by many to be the Beta version of Win 9. People that deal in computers are geeks and get excited about every new development whether good or bad - and they cannot always be relied upon for straightforward advice.

4) The problems with Win 8 have been known right from the start: http://www.naturescapes.net/phpBB3/v...p?f=2&t=222309

5) Want more information? http://www.infoworld.com/d/microsoft...its-bad-200113

The best advice I could offer is for Grant to "UPGRADE" to Win 7. The problem with this is that all new machines are running Win 8 and one can't get Win 7 anymore. PITY.

Glenn

[John Morton]

I'm still running Windows XP.

My last upgrade was to the then new AMD dual core 3800 processor.

At the time, I was working with scans of 35mm film that my Minolta DiMage Scan Elite 5400 put out: 233 megabytes at its top resolution; and I had optimized my computer to work with those.

Switching to digital capture and a Nikon D700 actually gave my computer a new lease on life. Someday I'll switch to 64 bit processing but it's all good so far...

[AB26]

Hi Grant,

Welcome to the age of technological advancement. How do you think Mr Gates got to be so rich?

My condolences with the bank account.

[groovesection]

I'm still running Windows XP.

My last upgrade was to the then new AMD dual core 3800 processor.

My microwave has more computational power than that

[Manfred M]

I would hesitate to say that Photoshop was struggling with the file size; rather your computer appears to have been sadly underpowered. If it was struggling, my suspicion is that you did not have enough memory on board (RAM), assuming of course that your machine was not so old as to have been able to be upgraded. Photoshop and Lightroom are not particularly processor intensive applications, so when I went from my D90 (12MP) to the D800 (36MP), I had no issues whatsoever.

There are times that minor upgrades to your existing machine is all you need to do. I am looking at taking my ~3 year old machine up a notch by installing 16GB of RAM (currently it has 8GB), which will cost me in the order of $100. I had to move over to Vista at one point when Adobe released software that was not compatible with XP.

While Windows 8 really does not offer a lot to the home desktop or laptop user, the deficiencies are easy enough to work around. My wife is running CS6 and Lightroom 4 on her Windows 8 laptop.

[xpatUSA]

I'm surprised Gates is still alive

A wonderful OP which explains fully why I continue with PSE6, XP Pro, Sigma SD10 with it's 5-9MB RAW files and why my old Mac (for music stuff) still runs very well on system 9.0.

My photographic skill has yet to rise above Picasa, let alone PSE6!

[jcuknz]

When I had troubles with my faithful old machine, she started with Beta W2000, I fortunately had a new machine waiting in the wings but unused becuse it was Vista which I replaced with W7 .... Old faithful died on me and I meanwhile got hold of a copy of XP and fortunately my Guru was able to organise the machine so as part of starting I pass through a window asking me which I want to use XP or W7, default is XP. I have looked at Lightroom and Elements 11 and will delete them at the end of the trial month. I am getting the hang of W7 from very occasional uses of it but will stick with XP .... my microwave is a cheap warehouse model so I am sure XP has more despite what Anton writes Why on earth M<S changed things around when they had a damn good programme I will never know .... I guess change for the sake of getting new customers ... stupid IMO

[loosecanon]

With digital editing software it is worth investing in a good graphics card with lots of memory, and if a laptop one with a dedicated graphics card. Photoshop etc prefer to use this memory as it speeds everything up a lot. The advantage of moving to 64bit is the release from the 4GB memory limit for all ram including the graphics.

[DeepWater]

I can sympathize - I was running CS4 and when CS6 came out decided to take the plunge... guess what? I found out right away that xp was not going to cut it - upgrade to windows 7 and still no joy - now it was coffee time whenever I tried to do anything in PS - so, out came the computer again and another road trip to PCMD - long story short after a new mother board and CPU, a new graphics card with 2 gig of on-board memory and 16 gig of ram I am up and running and have instant response to almost any function in CS6, but it's a lesson for all of us to take to the bank (pun intended When you want to upgrade make sure you are ready to upgrade everything, cause you may have to!

[John Morton]

When you want to upgrade make sure you are ready to upgrade everything, cause you may have to!

That's pretty much what I am thinking: no point in leaving Photoshop CS4 behind until I am ready to invest in a really good 64 bit computer.

[drjuice]

This is not so much as a query, just a gentle rant about equipment frustration.

... Frustration No 5
The computer is wonderful. Everything runs superbly and Windows 8 seems to burrow into all my peripherals identifying them correctly, calibrating monitors, etc in the blink of an eye. But here is the final rub. I can't turn the rotten thing off. No amount of poking the power button will make the beast shut down. It literally laughs at my puny attempts to turn it off. Anyone else have this problem? Short of pulling the power cord, which seem a bit drastic I am at my wits ends. Mr Gates, are you out there! This is a cry from the heart of one of the many minions who made you the richest man in the world. Please come and turn my computer off....

Grant

Hi, Grant,

Have you tried CTRL-ALT-DELETE which should pop up the Windows Task Manager (if the folks at M$ didn't change things for v8). When the Windows Task Manager comes up there should be an item in the task bar labeled "Shut Down" from which you can select what you want to do. If you like "Hibernate" as much as I do, you may need to activate that function in the v8 functional equivalent of Control Panel.

Here's a screen shot from my XP Pro at SP3:



virginia

[Colin Southern]

Hi, Grant,

Have you tried CTRL-ALT-DELETE which should pop up the Windows Taskmaster

CTRL+SHIFT+ESCAPE to go straight into task manager on most Windows PCs.

[xpatUSA]

CTRL+SHIFT+ESCAPE to go straight into task manager on most Windows PCs.

CTRL-ALT-DEL in Windows XP Pro (also XP Home), SP1, SP2 and SP3.

[Colin Southern]

CTRL-ALT-DEL in Windows XP Pro (also XP Home), SP1, SP2 and SP3.

Not on my one ...

CTRL+ALT+DEL ...

[IMG][/IMG]

CTRL+SHIFT+ESCAPE ...