Damned computers..........

[Fogey]

..........and Hewlett Packard.............and Microsoft............A bigger bunch of finger poking twats I have ever come across.

Hewlett packard decided to update the drivers for the printer I'm using, and without telling anybody their bloody software did  it automatically and completely naffed up the printer.

While I was trying to reinstall the drivers that came with the disk, this bloody software was trying to update the firmware to accommodate the printer drivers that weren't working.  Meanwhile, Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, decided to  update their software resulting in my computer having a catastrophic crash, where half the drives I used to store photos and important data, suddenly became corrupted.
I had to spend an age reconfiguring the network, the router, the DVD drive, the printer and recovering the files that had all the details of my online banking.  The end result is that I had to format one drive, losing an awful lot of photos as they simply couldn't be recovered.
Fortunately for me, I had backed up the most important ones online, so all was not lost.

Interfering, finger poking bastards! 

Rant over.

[Denis]

Long gone the days when you had control !

The tech giants rule and control and there is nothing you can really do about it. I personally hate both Google and Faceache for their intrusiveness.

[stevedevil]

Apple are not much better! their latest software update for the Mac's just decided to stop the EOS download programme, so could not access any CR2 images from Canon 7D, so spent hours attempting to delete the hard drive, and install the older version of software, took a couple of days, but now Mac complains every day that I have to do a software update.. AAARRGGHHHHH...

[JamesT]

One of many reasons why I use Linux.

[Denis]

I nearly went down the Linux route a few years ago, I guess laziness and wondering what programs would or would not work was a factor for me James, do you have any problems with software like Lightroom, Topaz ect ??

 

Edited December 16, 2020 by Denis
typo

[JamesT]

11 minutes ago, Denis said:

I nearly went down the Linux route a few years ago, I guess laziness and wondering what programs would or would not work was a factor for me James, do you have any problems with software like Lightroom, Topaz ect ??

 

I mainly use RawTherapee for raw processing (DarkTable is the main alternative) and "global" processing (colour curves, sharpening, graduated filters ...), and then gimp for anything that needs more localized processing (e.g. dust removal). I don't do a lot of fancy processing with multiple layers or special effects so I don't know what's available there.

For panoramas there is Hugin.

P.S. all of the above are free software, and are also available on Windows & Mac as well. The only commercial tool I use is VueScan for scanning negatives as Xsane is very bad at colour negatives.

[Denis]

I remember Martin referencing Darktable, I downloaded it and looked at it but in the end I stuck with Lightroom, to which there is loads of things I have not learned to understand within it. Gimp seems very complicated also. As I said, I am a slow learner at software, give me a combustion engine anyday, I can tear that down and rebuild it, but software fogs my brain

Edited December 16, 2020 by Denis
typo

[Fogey]

I have now gone into the configuration files of all the programmes that has any thing remotely to do with photo editing and disabled the auto-update. 

Now it's just a case of trawling the back-up archives to locate some very sensitive files that became inaccessible with this corrupted drive.  Once I got the corruption sorted out, it was a case of reinstalling the data files.

I have located the main image directory with some 10,000 image files from a back-up and I now need a large external drive on which to store it.

The real problem is every program is configured to keep re-installing the auto update, so wherever possible I have configured Microsoft to run these programmes as a third party - then I only have to worry about one update - and that will be on my say so.