My Toshiba laptop is on life support. Being older than four years, the stalwart tool is losing data fast. As I never did proper back ups, I have it in the shop for a complete back-up of the C drive, and when it gets home, I will be running a HD back up as sort of, well, an iron lung (cue Ian Anderson).
I am contemplating sending the laptop back to its infant stages by wiping everything out and starting over. The only programs I have ever used, that I can think of, are the Photoshop (version 2, which I bought used from Fred Flintstone) and whatever came bundled or free, such as Open Office and Firefox. I have the media for PSE 2 and can put that back on and continue to march. Any geeks out there have input on this?
Posting will be thin for about another week, as we are busy in the framing studio and in the final countdown before my show in California.
gif credit: msbilliejoemonique.
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4 comments:
First of all, thank you for your work both as a painter and as a blogger - I'm enjoying your posts and your art very much. I'm a photographer who likes color, abstraction/minimalism, and light, and am looking for a good pastel teacher in the Eugene area to teach me how to move into the painting realm. Do you have any suggestions/connections?
I switched to a Mac for home use a number of years ago simply because I was tired of worrying about viruses, spyware, zombies, data and identity theft etc, and don't have the security skills that the IT people at my college do. I just wanted to use my computer and forget about it. I've found that a number of friends had this same concern and asked me to help them switch to a Mac for the same reason. (Tech stuff: since Macs are now based on Unix, it's not possible for a malware program to install itself the way it can on a PC. So unless you type in your admin password, no functioning software gets installed.) So that's my first tech suggestion.
As an artist, I also appreciate the aesthetics of using a Mac - both the software and the hardware are elegantly designed. I enjoy using it, while I never did experience my PC machines as aesthetic in any way.
As an artist and blogger who doesn't use a computer much, you might find this unnecessary. On the other hand, making a switch might help you see some possibilities for computer use that you're not seeing so far: doing your finances on a computer, using Lightroom to organize and tweak your images and then automatically create web galleries of your work,using blogging software like Ecto that both simplifies and enriches the drafting and layout process of posting blogs, etc.
You can also get a Time Capsule, which is a combination wireless router and hard drive, and set it to do automatic backups of your Mac so that if your computer dies or is stolen/dropped/accidentally erased, you've got all your data without the difficulty of remembering to manually back it up.
I hope this gives you some food for thought without sounding like the usual Mac fanboy rant!
best wishes,
Paul
paulbiz@mac.com
www.morninglightphoto.com
Oregon is a big enough place, but my only recommendations are Marla Baggetta, near Portland, Kitty Wallis in Portland, and Richard McKinley in Medford. I guess you are in between, but the Willamette Valley is prime terrain if you happen to be thinking of doing landscapes, especially on sight!
I look at the computer world from a consumer's perspective (since I'll never be a technical expert!). To me, there are multiple brands of PC, and 1 brand of MAC. Also, I don't want the headache of trying to match-up software from PC to MAC. Even though I only use one or two programs! That's kind of goofy, I guess, but such is my level.
My abiding aesthetic on computers is the terror of Dave saying, "Open the pod bay door, HAL." I am not as terrified as I used to be, but still...
Update: my Toshiba shut itself down for the tech. people before it finished the copy. Now, I don't feel so dumb. It has always had a tendency to overheat, which goes to the brand, I'm afraid. IMHO, a laptop should be able to keep itself cool enough to operate - but what do I know?
dear casey
best of luck with your show!
computer headaches are a waste of time & energy & makes me realise just how much time one spends sitting in front of a screen, tiring one's eyes & wasting valuable painting time.
go mac... my imac is nearly nin years old & still functioning if a bit slow
get a large extena&l hard disk & backup regualrly to there. computers like to have large empty spaces on their hardisks... like us who dream?
Funny!
Got the external (iron lung).
Thanks, Adam.
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