Tales of Woe, and hopefully meeting a new friend

 After many trials and tribulations, so many, I had given up blogging about them. I’ve had a whole series of older computers from my business die off one by one over a few years. The majority have suffered death by upgrade, so i'm starting to fear those massive windows updates that never really worked. I guess one of the big problems was I had older hardware and it was stuck in Windows 10 land and not upgradeable.

I had replaced an old favourite PC in my studio with a slimed-down Lenovo box. It had a small ssd drive, supported by two hard drives, adequate memory, it was an i5 and it ran Windows 11, I love it. It did have problems running a large-screen TV when using the second screen/monitor or projector. But I do love the fact that I can have a large screen TV on the wall, perfect to paint from. Most of the computer gear sits on a narrow shelf and I have a couple of keyboards, one waterproof on my art table and a second wireless., that can be used anywhere. The table is set up such that I can draw and paint on it or I can also use with one of two easels standing up. I’ve also recovered an old sound bar so I can have good quality music as I’m painting. Its also set up for running Zoom meetings and making You tube videos (if I have the time!)

I still use an older Windows 10 HP Pavilion desktop in my office as the master for my network and main computer. It’s also got a small ssd drive but has 2 internal and 3 USB hard drives hanging off it. It is currently doubling as my master media storage, (eg photos videos and music). Unfortunately, it is misbehaving a bit, Finally I do miss my NAS storage, which no longer works on my upgraded LAN (windows 11 is implicated) , I really wish I knew why.

Quite a while ago the battery died in my beloved little HP Spectre. The little two-in-one that I took travelling, sitting on the couch or in fact all over the place. It was getting quite old and only had a small 11” screen but I still loved it and missed it dearly. The ordeal and potential expense associated with trying to get the battery replaced meant it is lying dormant.

I had a corneal graft last year and struggled a lot when one of my two monitors on my main computer decided to go dark, very dark, too dark to read easily. Taking the monitor off the computer and plugging it into something else showed it was fine so I assume it’s the graphics card on the computer, or a graphics driver upgrade issue, just another frustration with the Windows world. I’ve really had a lot of trouble getting used to what now appear contrasty monitors and smaller text (OK it’s the same size text just harder to see without an update to my glasses prescription after the corneal graft]. I can only get about one hour at the screen before my eyes feel strained. Usually not enough time when I’m playing with photos,

So I’ve been looking seriously at different screen technologies and decided I like TVs with OLED screens. I used to like the Apple iPhone style IPS format screens on my phone and Spectre, and was with LCD monitors. So I had begun investigating screen type and size, by actually looking at them in stores. When I noticed an advert on TV about the Lenovo Yoga Range, two-in-one style computers, checking the web there was a model based on an Intel EVO i7 processor with a 14inch  OLED screen. I was at Office Works on a different matter and so I checked it out. It was very easy to read at a standard viewing distance. I didn’t take long to decide it was time to get an upgrade.

So welcome Slaty, so named because it’s very thin, layered and a dark grey. I look forward to you becoming a great friend.

The strange case of transparency & memory

After taking up the offer to download perfect effects 8, which is over now by the way, I was puzzled by the fact that when I ran the stand alone browser on my computers (I tried it out on two separate computers) would end up hanging as I clicked on a photo in the browser. Looking around the install notes and the manual I saw a warning for windows users about the graphic card drivers and memory (the minimum is stated as OpenGL 2.0 compatible video card with 256 MB dedicated video RAM, 1280x720 resolution) . BUT my drivers where up to date and I had exactly the required dedicated graphics memory on one computer and considerably more on the other. Some photography related forums have similar posts from several other frustrated OnOne window's user.  The link through lightroom worked fine, so I just had to stop using the standalone version.

I was checking out some diagnostics about system tune up stuff that HP provides on my desktop computer and one item grabbed my interest it related to the screen theme and it reported that the theme I was using, the Aero style, was using its full quota of memory and my system might be faster if I just used the Windows 7 Basic theme. Ok it made a very slight, perhaps imperceptible improvememt, but only if I was looking, to browsing speed and starting up new windows. The most obvious thing Areo does is give you transparent edges on your window as if you are looking through a glass pane. It looks nice but is just cosmetic, so it didn’t bother me having it turned off. You can find where to change the screen themes by clicking on your screen background and selecting personalize, you’ll have to scroll down a bit to find Windows 7 Basic theme. The interesting outcome is the edges of my panes are still translucent?

Graphics memory! I realized this might be the missing issue for running Photo Effects 8 in standalone mode. AND it was!

So if you have a windows PC and are having problems with Perfect Effects “freezing”and “hanging” your system, try changing the screen theme, it worked for me.