BACK UP & RUNNING!

Well, gang - it's been a while...

I am very happy to say I am finally up and running again. It's been a long hard slog and a very steep learning curve.

However, armed with strong cups of coffee

and therefore alert as possible (virtually hyper: you could have scraped me off the ceiling!) I mentally girded my loins, took a very deep breath, tried not to whimper - and went for it!

Suffice to say: the computer now has a new hard drive, more memory (1GB) and a brand new super powered graphics card - all put in by me with my own hands! Plus I was also stuck on the end of the phone for nearly an hour, having to reconfigure the actual hardrive itself - lots of black screen with white letters and numbers scrolling across, then actually typing in the actual commands to make the thing work. THEN another 3 hours feeding in the programming discs. I hope I never have to do it again in this lifetime!

I am now finally able to slowly load up all my stuff, and the machine does seem to be behaving better (you can tell I'm being cautiously optimistic...)

One regret - I totally love Font Frenzy (see Geeks R Us links on the right) as it takes out all the fonts except the ones the computer actually needs to run - and puts these all into another folder. Which meant I could happily download all my fave grunge fonts, and get at them at any time. So thanks to Windows Update forcibly putting patches etc onto the machine, I now have Windows Service Pack 3 - which has rendered the Font Frenzy unuseable. If I hadn't gone through all this agony and spent days loading stuff back on, I'd be tempted to wipe the machine down again just so I could keep it. Hopefully, Sound Ministries will write an update and then I can happily go on using it. Waaah.

DID YOU KNOW - if you have too many fonts installed right into your Fonts folder on your computer, that it can render the machine a little unstable. Try to keep it down to 300 if you can! (Now you know why I love Font Frenzy - I'm addicted, and keep dowloading all these freebie ones, and had over 600). So if you have too many fonts, you might want to transfer them into another folder elsewhere, and just load them in when you actually need to use them.

Anyhow, now I am back in some sort of order, I'll catch up on posting the life drawing classes - these pix are backing up! Incidentally, I have now done 2 sessions of the Photoshop course, so you might start seeing better pictures in the next couple of weeks. I am still trying to get my head around Raster and Vector layers. As they said in Airplane the movie, "What's the vector, Victor?"

See ya.
B&Whotos from Tack-o-Rama (see Links) and typewriter pic my original photograph