Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Weather and Software Woes

The weather has kept me inside recently so no new photographs. Not totally sure it is the weather since I can barely force myself to grocery shop and several important errands are still undone. This is usually when I resort to photographing my computer desk. However, I got on a kick of doing montage. Some of my headshots of Janet seem to adapt very well to combining with textures so I have downloaded a couple dozen free texture files to play with.

If I were not having so many computer problems I might be doing more of the extreme manipulations but I can’t get Virtual Painter to work at all and often have problems opening NX and PSP at the same time. I am spending some time doing backup to DVD of the photo collection since I can’t get the computer to address the new 1.5TB external drive. When I get everything backed up I plan on formatting the C Drive and starting from scratch.

Two programs that I recently loaded have given me considerable headaches. One was Your Faster PC or something like that—I have uninstalled it because it was way bad news but the worst offender is the highly advertised Carbonite for online backups. Boy was that a mistake. First it will only back up my C Drive—you don’t back up C Drives, you format and reload. I do not keep any data other than Favorites and Contacts on the C Drive. All data (which is what you need backed up) is on external hard drives. Carbonite does not, will not, back up external drives. What a crock—totally useless—but it takes its toll by slowing down everything else that you do plus hogging band width. A total waste of money—but to top it off it disables the Delete key and supplies no uninstall software. They say to go to the Windows Software Manager to remove—guess what—it doesn’t show up in the Software Manager. I finally renamed the EXE files so it won’t function which keeps it from slowing everything down, but I can’t find a way to get rid of the @$@%%# program so it is still taking up disk space. Carbonite gives you a month or two of free service is you recommend it to a friend and the friend makes the same mistake you did. Of course you loose a friend in the process.

Anyway here are a few of the montage photos that I have done while the photo files are being written to DVD’s.






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