I got a new PC this week. It’s not brand new – it’s my son’s old PC – but it’s still vastly more powerful than my old machine. It has the luxury of a solid-state drive being installed meaning it boots up fast and the applications I use are similarly speedy to get going. I swapped out the secondary storage drive for a larger capacity model, so I now have a lot of room to add more pictures too.
It’s not all smooth sailing though. I have my files backed up via a cloud service and it’s taken days to download all the files back onto the new machine. I’ve also had headaches getting Lightroom to play nicely with the catalog I exported from the old machine and, while I have my scanning software installed, as well as Negative Lab Pro, I’m having problems getting Epson Scan to work. A lot of people don’t seem to like Epson Scan very much, but I’ve always found it very effective when scanning B&W medium and large format negatives, so I would like to get it working if possible. I can fall back on Vuescan (which I use for scanning colour negatives and slide film anyway) and do the inversions in Negative Lab Pro, which I’ve tried and had good results, but it means getting used to a different workflow. I’m not sure if I can scan multiple negatives in a batch with Vuescan either (although I haven’t looked into it properly yet).
Anyway, hopefully the storm-clouds of getting everything configured to my needs will soon thin and I can enjoy the benefits of a faster PC.
A rare foray into digital pictures for the blog today, with the shot below coming from my Ricoh GR III. These sorts of clouds are very rare hereabouts, so I had to grab a picture when I saw them. I thought we might be in for a huge storm, but they just drifted by without much fuss in the end.
Ricoh GR III
Taken on 7 November 2023
Steel City Snapper photography 
It’s always a huge hassle to get going with a new PC. Especially with Windows, it’s like things you had set up and working a certain way for years on one computer (usually after a ton of grief nonetheless) outright refuse to work again on a new one no matter what you do.
If it weren’t for so much software being Windows-only, I would switch fully to open source Linux distros and never look back. I’m not a Mac OS fan these days, either; I haven’t been since, in my opinion, they abandoned everything that made them great circa early 2000s. But I really, really can’t stand Windows these days, especially anything beyond Windows 7. XP SP3 was the best version of Windows ever in my view. But as far as I’m concerned, everything before and since has been some varying level of garbage, with some iterations being better (98 SE, 2000, 7) and some being absolutely awful (95, ME, Vista, 8, 10, 11). Perhaps Windows software emulation via Wine for Linux will eventually allow me to rid myself of Windows for good…
Anyway, best of luck getting everything up and running again.
And, oh yeah, those are some nice clouds. 😉
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Thanks P. It mostly seems to be working ok at the moment, so hopefully it will remain that way. I do feel somewhat on edge however. I think I’ll need a couple of weeks before I’m confident it’s not going to bite me in some way.
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