I've come in from the cold

[DJH Imaging]

Hello, not posted for a while so I thought I'd better have a look and see what's been happening. I had a nice e-mail from Jools concerned about my whereabouts, she thought I might be on a world cruise or ran away to join the circus.

In fact the gigs came think and fast at the end of last year, then I had to get some things ready for our gigs in Buckingham for 2010, 13 confirmed so far and more to come. I'm also trying to put a year book together of photo's I'd taken at our venue and had all good intention of getting this completed before Christmas, this was until I had a major hard drive failure which resulted in losing a lot of files, to top it all, the backup hard drive containing all my photo's for 2009 also failed, at which point I did say a few rude words!

Fortunately with the help from a colleague, who's job is recovering data, all was not lost and I think most are now recovered. So I took this opportunity to upgrade the old computer and I'm now getting my head around Windows 7 64bit and the fact that a lot of my old software is not compatible, so more expense.

So I thought I'd take this lull in the concert going to say sorry I've not been around to say Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and Happy Birthday, I have been listening on the Internet radio, thank heavens for Wifi, for the weeks without a computer, but hopefully I'll be about more as I've only got a few gigs to go to in January and that's weather permitting.

Dave

[tamsmith]

Hi Dave,

sorry to hear about your HW failures!
but before you start spending a lot of money on 64 bit versions of the apps. you already have, consider running them in XP compatability mode, or on a virtual XP instance under Win 7.

The toolbox is downloadable from Microsoft.

Tam

[DJH Imaging]

Thanks for that, I have managed to get Photoshop CS2 working. I have an old version of MS Office 2000 that I didn't bother trying to load, I'm using the free office package www.openoffice.org I only need a simple Word Processor and Spreadsheet so that'll do me. Forgetting Windows has a Firewall, I loaded Zone Alarm Firewall which caused the system to freeze which in turn caused havoc with the RAID system installed, it took 36 hours to re-sync the 3 hard drives. So I'm treading carefully, but I always welcome the advice.

Dave

[hippy-law]

Very nice to hear that you havent run away and left us. Sorry about your computer bother but you seem to have a very handy knowlagable friend on your side. :thumbsup: Well done collegue of yours. Hows your year book coming along now?

Nice to have you back and posting :thumbsup:

[jrdavis50]

Welcome back, Dave!

Your trials and tribulations reminded me of why I shouldn't rush to update to Win 7. Good luck with everything.

As an old Word Perfect junkie who hates Word (but loves Excel) I've found Open Office to be very satisfying compromise. Hope you like it as well.

[DJH Imaging]

Very nice to hear that you havent run away and left us. Sorry about your computer bother but you seem to have a very handy knowlagable friend on your side. :thumbsup: Well done collegue of yours. Hows your year book coming along now?

Nice to have you back and posting :thumbsup:

Hi,yep it's great when someone says, I can help you out there, especially when I never knew that this was his day job, I know him as he used to be one of our sound men at our venue. The book is coming along fine, I say book it's move a novel probably 50+ pages, thankfully mainly photos. I will get a few printed and then leave it online if anybody else is interested in buying a copy. I going to use a company called www.blurb.com I will let you know when it's finally uploaded and you can view a sample.

Welcome back, Dave!

Your trials and tribulations reminded me of why I shouldn't rush to update to Win 7. Good luck with everything.

As an old Word Perfect junkie who hates Word (but loves Excel) I've found Open Office to be very satisfying compromise. Hope you like it as well.

I doubt Windows 7 is that much of a problem and don't view my experience as the norm, I've just has a catalogue of errors that's meant I'm being cautious. I would only ever upgrade the operating system when I change computers, this should keep me going for a while. Open Office is very good, especially as it's free, also in comparison to MS Office it takes up very little space. The only reason for wanting MS Office would be to allow me to do some work from home but then I thought if that's what the company want me to do, they can pay for it.

Dave

[tamsmith]

It seems that that Microsoft has learned something after the Vista desaster, Win 7 appears to be much more stable as Vist ever was.

I remember around year 2000, MS wanted to combine their three 'flavours' of Windows (CE, ME and NT) into one common Windows version for all platforms.

There where jokes about it:

CEMENT - hard as rock, dumb as a brick!

But Dave, Open Office does support MS-Office documents (opening and saving), but if you are a 'hard core' Excel user, you'll find a lot of differences.

Open Office is a subset of Suns Star Office, and IBM's (Lotus) Symphony is a subset of OO.

But you are right, if the company expects you to work at home, then they should provide the resources.

Tam