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System Crash

Posted by on May 23, 2011

Last Thursday my desktop system froze and the video went all screwy. After several attempts to power it down I finally unplugged it and left it that way for a couple of hours while I went to pick Michelle up at the airport.

When we got home it took several more attempts to get it to actually boot but I managed to get it up and running. Then Friday morning I came down and hadn’t been using it for more than an hour when the same thing happened again.

I’m pretty sure it’s the video card that’s causing me problems but I don’t have a spare that I can test it with right now and I’m on the fence about just buying a new one. I could try taking the card out of Michelle’s desktop but I’m reluctant because if the problem is somewhere else I risk trashing her card as well. I DON’T want that to happen, the couch isn’t that comfortable.

Right now I’m mainly using my MacBook and believe it or not so far it seems to be doing everything I need it to do.

I do all of my photo management in Lightroom and the license for that covers both the Mac and PC versions so it was a simple matter of downloading the latest trial and entering the key to get that up and running. Since I keep my catalog and all of the photos on an external drive anyway all I had to do was point Lightroom to where the catalog was and I was back up and running. The only thing I had to re-configure was the Metadata set that I had setup for all newly imported pictures and to point the Auto-Import settings to the new drive name for importing my Eye-Fi uploads automatically.

I was a bit disappointed that the PhotoShop Elements disk I have doesn’t include the Mac version but I’m tempted to download the trial and see if the license key works light the Lightroom one did. If not I’ve got a $10.00 off code from Amazon and I noticed the other day that they were currently running a $20.00 mail in rebate so I could get a copy of version 9 for $30.00. It might be worth upgrading if that’s the case.

The only other thing I have to check is being able to run EQ2. I know I can run it from the Bootcamp partition but I’m about to test running a single instance of it using Parallels without having to reboot.

If I can make all of this work I’m half tempted to just stick to running off my laptop. I’ve currently got dual screens using my large monitor from my desktop and most of my apps and data files are on external drives so I have more than enough storage. Even so It wouldn’t be that difficult to pack up everything but the external monitor and have my full PC setup available to me on vacation. That sounds kind of sweet.

 

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