Good news and a tease

Peach Blooms

Hello again, everyone. I am back up and running, mostly. Actually, was back on the internet this past Saturday. However, I had to wait for a USB enclosure to arrive for the 1TB hard drive that had my main photography data on it. The enclosure came in yesterday, and it seems to be working really well. More after the jump.


So, you might be asking what I got to replace the dead desktop. Well, I got an HP dv7-1285 Pavilion "Entertainment" Laptop PC. Ordinarily I would have ordered an upgrade on-line with a custom configuration. However, the systems would not have started to be built until April 17th with suspected delivery near the end of the month. I couldn't wait that long, so I went to our local big box store which actually had a couple system configurations which were close to my needs.

The system I have now is quite nice. A bright 17" widescreen LCD display, 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo, 6 GB RAM, 500 GB hard drive, NVidia 9600M GT video card with 512 MB DDR2 dedicated RAM, 64-bit Vista Home Premium, wireless, Bluetooth, dual layer DVD/CD burner, and enough other acronyms to tongue-tie the Pentagon. I had to make a few compromises in system specs for the convenience of getting the laptop locally, but I think it was worth it in the end. The new set up as cleared a lot of desk space, although I've lost my old tablet due to driver issues. It was a fairly old model and I'm not surprised that it didn't work with Vista. Hopefully, I'll be able to get a new one at some point in the future. I had not yet fully acclimated to using it though, thus I don't see its' loss affecting me too much. A definite bonus is that I now have a dual monitor set-up which is wonderful for processing photographs. I'm not sure that I can go back to a single monitor system now.

Meanwhile, I have started going through those photographs from the recent trip to my parents', but I still have some processing to complete. Getting the new computer turned in to an opportunity to reconsider my processing workflow and storage organization. Thus, I'm still behind on getting those photographs finished up. However, consider the photograph above to be a tease of what else is to come from that trip. I should have a review of a couple books on Photoshop CS4 within the next week or so.

Keep shooting.