Ditching Microsoft and Google

Ditching Microsoft and Google

My main (office) PC recently died a silent upgrade death. This was the machine that ran a lot of my personal life, emails, on-line banking and purchases, Zoom, website development, photo management, and my local network. It did a lot without complaint.

My backups were not so good. Photos were fine, but documents and other files hadn't been properly backed up since around May last year. Oops. To make things worse, I'd been relying on Google to sync my browser settings and passwords across computers — except it turns out it wasn't doing that as reliably as I assumed. Lesson learned.

So I'm officially a bit annoyed at both Microsoft (endless updates) and Google (false sense of security). Older and wiser.

My solution? Well, I'm not going to buy a new computer, no Windows for sure, and definitely a different browser. I already knew Linux was an option. I'd previously booted a old notebook from a USB stick running Linux Mint xfce, and it worked well. I then dug out an old Toshiba laptop that had died upon update and been gathering dust for years, fiddled with the boot settings, and got Linux Mint Cinnamon running from USB. After a week of testing, I was confident enough to install it properly. A few disk errors made for a tedious afternoon of troubleshooting, but eventually it booted up perfectly.

I really should have stopped there. I ran some updates, noticed a restart was recommended, and thought — why not tidy up some cables at the same time?

Restarted the laptop.

Bugger… Blank Screen……

This came as a bit of a Surprise

I’ve a had a weekend of well meaning folk giving me a hard time because I avoid apple products, particularly the IPad and IPhone and most things “appleverse” (like calling their shop a “city square” and their salespeople “geniuses”). I’m not an apple hater. I still have my iPod, (even though its battery is shot and can’t be user replaced, an incredibly common design flaw in most apple hand held devices, giving them only a guaranteed 2-4 year life expectancy). I just think they are overprices and whilst they do a restricted number of things very well they are pretty inflexible at others… ok I’ll stop there because I don’t want the emotion rhetoric or flame war to start. Anyway it piqued my interest and I decided to look at just who looks at my blog. This is the summary graph by operating system produced by blogger, which hosts this blog

I was surprised! Even If I add together all the Macs, iPhones & IPads its a little over 15% of my readers. So the apple fanboys probably won’t be reading this anyway. What did stun me was the number 39% for Linux users. Obviously I assume I must appeal to the free thinkers, less conventional and nerdy types (or maybe just search bots) as well as the corporate world and more precisely those that can afford the cheaper PCs (windows user 38%). The lesser surprise is the also small number of phones 10%, whereas my website stats have shown viewing with a smart phone to be approaching 50%. Is this because blogger is a bit ordinary in mobile mode or there are no popular HTML “readers” for mobiles. Maybe I am not seeing the true picture, but perhaps it is good that I have avoided the “shiny new toy” syndrome that seems to just focus on gear, (most photography podcasts, you tubers, blogs, and owners of the latest apple gear) not how they can be used. It steels my resolve to return to the mission I started with this blog over 15 years ago, that is “Things They Forgot to Tell You About Digital Photography”.

More Upgrade angst

There haven’t been many blog post of late, any free computer time I have available has been spent just patching up, re-installing or watching with fingers crossed yet another update. Somewhat fortunately I think I am finally moving forward.

That was until I wanted to do a bit of work on my studio computer (more that just listen to music, or control a chromecast). I wanted to change the display (to suit an old TV, a Sony Bravia, it has nice natural colour, good resolution and a big screen). Well it might be easy if I can change the settings (and the setting tab no longer works, thanks microsoft!)

After a while I manage to get to the settings (by doing a right click on the start menu) and the settings seemed to be working. Then I got a notification about an update status, so I went and had a look. Damn its still trying to update, at least now it realize it can't, before I have to go through that frustrating upgrade loop. I wonder if it will ever realize I really don’t want to upgrade , I’d rather  just fix what I have now.

When will this madness end? 

Damn I can’t find a display setting that takes advantage of the Bravia big screen

Recovery has made it worse

I still running into a lot of roadblocks trying to fix my new computer after the last windows upgrade. My first though was a roll back to the previous version. Damn that is not allowed!!! 10 days is a might short time!

Next I tried going back to my recovery media (which I created on an SD card), so that was a challenge and it seemed to hang a couple of times during the update but I patiently let it work through its issues. It seemed to work ok for a day or so. However now I have to go through two or three cycles of that sad face and blue screen of near death before I can log in.

Now my PIN doesn’t work at all, my password fails often and I frequently end up at the screen that telling windows didn’t load correctly. As if I didn’t know that!

Now the computer has decided to go back to ignoring me and just showing the spinners. Seems to be always when I’m doing something important (or even blogging). OK another recover it has to be!

Have you tried the Microsoft Support link?

 

Needless to say I’m not happy

Backup Your Photos NOW! BUT NOT to Google+

If you are a windows user now is an important time to back up your digital photos, only don’t back them up using google+ …!  The 29th. July & 1st. August are possibly two significant dates for digital photographers using Windows PC, Tablets and Phones.

The 29th is the date microsoft is planning to roll out free version of windows 10 to anyone with a valid windows7 or 8 licence. If you are one of those you will probably have already seen the little get windows 10 icon on your task bar. (if you think you should have received this invite but haven’t, then log on from the computer concerned to the microsoft window 10 site and find the reserve windows 10 button).  I doubt this is going to be a Y2K style non-event.

However I really do expect to see some heart ache and sad stories. Upgrading an operating system generally comes with some such hickups. So what should you do to avoid any grief?

1. Backup up all your photos now. It doesn’t really matter what software you are managing the photos with at least backup up all the original photos (be it .jpeg, DNG or other RAW formats) just make sure you have a viable copy on a separate media (ie not on your computers hard disk) I would strongly recommend a media that is easy to selectively restore from (ie avoid large compressed archives or cloud solutions) just use removable media (like CDs or DVD, probably lots of them) or better still USB style backpack drives (a 1TB drive should be less than $100, and will be a useful backup well after any upgrade). Why not make two copies and store one off site (ie a proper backup strategy)
2. Look at the key software you have and search out the original install disk and/or the registration codes for downloads and updates. Check the suppliers web sites because they are likely to have important driver updates or other advice. If the worst case scenarios eventuates and you have to reinstall, you are ready.
3. If you are still worried, wait a while. Even when to get the message windows 10 is ready you actually don’t have to update straight away (you have one year to do it) and might prefer to wait and watch complaints from other users. I have several PC and I am planning to just update one at a time, starting with the least used.

The 1st August is apparently the day google is planning to kill google+ photos. Ok there is a fair bit of hype around but I have already read Goodbye Google+ Photos, hello +Google Photos! What I can make of this is it really about the google+ android and IOS phone/tablet apps. They will be removed and soon stop working, yep stop working on the photo side. It doesn’t really go into what happens to the photos already in google+ photos (or picasa web albums). Still the mention of having to get them via google takeout (and thus shift through zip versions) doesn’t fill me with confidence. Right at the moment I know you can still access your photos  in the old picases web album interfaces (see te link in yellow below), I really want that ability to stay, However be aware that google+ Autobackup may not create that viable backup I’ve suggested in point 1 above. Again best to wait a while before you need to panic, but there is a google photos version, so updating now is a good idea if you want to use the backup feature .  I’ll be amazed if photos you have already uploaded can’t remain being access from the new google photos.

https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/myphotos?noredirect=1

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.