If you have been trying to hit my site of late (whadayamean you havent?!), you probably have noticed that it has been a bit hit and miss.
I am really not sure why. I have tested pretty much everything and just can not find anything wrong…… Not helpful or fun.
It seems to have been doing it for at least a week now.
This flakyness along with my continued frustration of getting more than 60% of anything working has lead me to consider yet another computer move…. Well, not so much computer as change the core OS.
I really did try and get along with Windows 7. I really wanted it to work. Really I did.
In a moment of clarity however, it came to me that all the Windows/Linux hassles came from me wanting to use ONE program. Lightroom.
When I was not doing any post processing of my photos and thus was running everything in Linux, all was good.
Then, I got into Lightroom and was running it in a virtual computer on my Linux computer. Because I could only use half of one of my eight CPU cores, it ran like a dog. That’s when I first changed to Windows. Sure, Lightroom ran well, real well, but the rest of my sanity went out the window.
So, as you may recall, I then switched to two computers. Linux for my web server/blog/photo gallery and Windows for Lightroom.
That’s when I had a lot of hassles sharing data between the two systems.
On top of that, I found that Windows does not do something’s very elegantly, like capture remote URLS, batch jobs or use component video capture cards.
Robert spent some time helping me try and get things going, but in the end, I came to see that I just was not using the right tool for the core job.
So, since you all decided for me that giving up was not an option, I have decided to go back to using Linux as my main operating system running the web site etc and do one of two things for Lightroom;
1. Try a new Virtual PC software that will use more cores of my CPU so the performance is better.
2. Give up on Lightroom and use GIMP for my post processing. (Last option, and not thrilled with the thought of this one).
3. Get and use a second computer for Windows and Lightroom, just turning it on when I need it. (And using Gary’s help to get the sharing between the two systems so I don’t have to use a USB stick to transfer the photo files as I was for a while).
So, at some stage soon, my web site will go down for an hour or so while I reformat the hard drive and load Linux and copy the web site etc over….. Oh, wait, given that its currently up and down like a hospital elevator, you probably wont notice any difference at all…. mmm, never mind.
P.S. Since I never did any post processing before I met Zim, I am blaming him for all my computer woes. You should blame him too. 🙂
