I am very happy to say I am finally up and running again. It's been a long hard slog and a very steep learning curve.However, armed with strong cups of coffee
and therefore alert as possible (virtually hyper: you could have scraped me off the ceiling!) I mentally girded my loins, took a very deep breath, tried not to whimper - and went for it!Suffice to say: the computer now has a new hard drive, more memory (1GB) and a brand new super powered graphics card - all put in by me with my own hands! Plus I was also stuck on the end of the phone for nearly an hour, having to reconfigure the actual hardrive itself - lots of black screen with white letters and numbers scrolling across, then actually typing in the actual commands to make the thing work. THEN another 3 hours feeding in the programming discs. I hope I never have to do it again in this lifetime!
I am now finally able to slowly load up all my stuff, and the machine does seem to be behaving better (you can tell I'm being cautiously optimistic...)One regret - I totally love Font Frenzy (see Geeks R Us links on the right) as it takes out all the fonts except the ones the computer actually needs to run - and puts these all into another folder. Which meant I could happily download all my fave grunge fonts, and get at them at any time. So thanks to Windows Update forcibly putting patches etc onto the machine, I now have Windows Service Pack 3 - which has rendered the Font Frenzy unuseable. If I hadn't gone through all this agony and spent days loading stuff back on, I'd be tempted to wipe the machine down again just so I could keep it. Hopefully, Sound Ministries will write an update and then I can happily go on using it. Waaah.
DID YOU KNOW - if you have too many fonts installed right into your Fonts folder on your computer, that it can render the machine a little unstable. Try to keep it down to 300 if you can! (Now you know why I love Font Frenzy - I'm addicted, and keep dowloading all these freebie ones, and had over 600). So if you have too many fonts, you might want to transfer them into another folder elsewhere, and just load them in when you actually need to use them.Anyhow, now I am back in some sort of order, I'll catch up on posting the life drawing classes - these pix are backing up! Incidentally, I have now done 2 sessions of the Photoshop course, so you might start seeing better pictures in the next couple of weeks. I am still trying to get my head around Raster and Vector layers. As they said in Airplane the movie, "What's the vector, Victor?"
See ya.
B&Whotos from Tack-o-Rama (see Links) and typewriter pic my original photograph
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5 comments:
That's a useful tip about the fonts - my gripe is that I have dozens of dull pre-loaded fonts which I am never going to use, (mostly Microsoft) so I am going to have a major cull now.
Hence the use of Font Frenzy! Here's the link again: http://www.sdsoftware.org/default.asp?id=5936
If it will work for you (depends on your system) it's really easy, with a great Help menu. You Defrenzy - the sytem takes a snapshot of all your fonts - then shifts all the boring, unnecessary ones to a different folder (you can replace them at any time).
I use this along with the AMP Font Viewer (also free):
http://www.ampsoft.net/utilities/FontViewer.php
as with this one you see two folders: Installed Fonts and Uninstalled Fonts - which shows you all the rest, wherever they are located! Then you can choose to install a particular font, install it temporarily (for the one session) or move it, delete it etc etc. I have all my fonts in a folder in My Documents, right where I can find them, and categorised into folders within that folder, eg: Modern Script, Oldfashioned Script, Typwriter, Grunge etc etc.
I have used both these for several years and been very happy with them. It's often the solution for a sluggish system - too many fonts can make some computers go completely haywire.
Hope this works for you,
Susie xox
Glad your back and hey Thanks for letting us know about Font Frenzy how cool is that! must give it a whirl!
Heavens...I'm not sure if my tired peanut brain can cope with all that! Thank you ever so much for taking the trouble - after sifting through fonts yet again yesterday I really need to sort them out, so I will look at these sites and see what happens..and I promise I won't delete anything without triple checking! You are a star. :)
As I got a few responses to this blog entry, I have put another post dealing with Font Frenzy, how to create System Restore points etc, which I hope you'll find helpful. It's all a maze and totally confusing...you can tell I found this all out the hard way!
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