PHOTOGRAPHIC THREADS: camera queries, any photo tech stuff!

[David Shaw]

I have spent most of today on the seacliffs at Yesnaby, Orkney. The scenery is magnificent and with a strong tide running the sea effects, aweinspiring. Of course, I had the camera out all of the time but I am aware that that the onshore wind was covering me, the camera and the car in a salt mist.
I always keep a UV filter over the lens of the camera and washed that as soon as we got back to the guest house we are staying in. Does anyone have any advice on cleaning the rest of the camera (Fuji Finepix S5700, an SLR type camera), or, does it need it? The filter certainly needed washing!

[David Nicholson]

David, as you know I have the same model but I wouldn't describe it as an 'SLR type camera'. Apart from a little blower for the lens which I use every now and then, I use spectacle cleaner for the screen and the view finder and sometimes wipe the body over with a barely damp lint free cloth. I haven't found it needs more than that.


Good picture by the way.

[mark smyth]

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[Maggi Young]

David (Shaw).. what a lovely way to spend your birthday!
 You weren't dangling Carol off those cliffs to get a better photo were you?!
Weather looks remarkably good for your hols 

[David Shaw]

Maggie. not dangling but I did try persuading Carol to walk out on a particulary spectactuar promentary for a pic: I can't realy blame her for refusing - I wouldn't have gone either.
Still doesn't help to decide whether or not to take the salty camera into the bath or not!

[art600]

Mark

I advise all my friends to look at www.7dayshop.com for photographic and computer supplies.  Goods are all VAT free and always cheaper than elsewhere.

[TC]

A correction to the last entry.  Goods are only VAT free up to an individual value of  £18 per item.  If you order several items up to this value, they are despatched separately to take advantage of the small purchases concession.  If the value on an item exceeds £18, then UK VAT will be levied.  I have used this company since they started trading and have found them totally reliable.

[mark smyth]

My desktop, about 3 years old, is starting to run very slow when I'm editing photos. Normally I can edit a photo very quickly but it now takes 1 minute per full size image to crop, resize and resave. Any ideas how I can get the computer to run faster?

[Carlo]

Without new hardware (or a new computer---three years is about life expectancy for a machine if you want to stay anywhere close to state of the art), I'd start by defragging the hard drive, cleaning off old files, storing what you don't need close at hand (especially the thousands of photos we take) on external hard drives, dumping your temporary files, cleaning out caches, etc. Almost all of this can be done from your "system tools" or whatever your brand of computing calls it.

[Slug Killer]

Hi Mark, the only real way I've ever come across is to back everything up including your favourites and e-mail and get someone to format and re-install windows for you. It's a pain having to install all your other software  but better than waiting all day for you computer to get a move on. I normally do this one a year but I had a manufacturers back up disk that sets everything back to how they supplied the system from the factory.

That was until about four weeks ago when it went bang and I now have a nice new PC. Went to my local PC shop and just bought the tower as I've got the monitor, mouse etc. Was surprised at the cost, only £175.00 for a machine that is twice the spec of my old one. Would have cost £60.00 more for windows but they could use the licence I had from the machine that went bang. Would have cost more to repair my old one. I asked while I was there how much they charge for re-installing windows and it was £38.50 which I thought was pretty good.

David

[mark smyth]

Well .. the PC is running out of memory very fast.

The hard drive is very small compared to what comes as standard these days. It's only 72GB of which only 8% is free.

My external hard drive, where I store my photos, is also very small compared to what is available now. It's 77GB and has only 10% free

My memory is only 1GB.

I've been looking at external and internal hard drives on Amazon. Does anyone know if it matters where the hard drive is?

[Dorry]

Mark,

I'm having a problem with my  internal hard drive. When I checked it via HDD Health.com it said it was very close to the end end of its life.

My computer is 6 years old and it would appear it is not possible to upgrade it easily. I have a 500G external hard drive for my genealogy so that is OK but the internal HDD drives everything else.

If you Google The Guardian & Technology & Ask Jack there are two requests for a similar problem.

It will depend on the age of your computer.  External HDD are practically plug &
play and just depends on the depth of your pocket. I purchased a Freecom from Amazon.

Regards

Dorry

[mark smyth]

Dorry I'll look up the info later, thanks. Welcome to the forum!

Does anyone know if simply adding an extra 3GB of memory, very cheap from 7dayshop,  will speed my computer?

[Maggi Young]

Welcome, Dorry! As someone who has recently had sick pc problems, I sympathise with your dying machine.....

[TC]

Mark

A computer hard drive needs about 25% free space to run the operating system efficiently.  From what you say, you are well in excess of this.  You could replace the hard drive with a large capacity model , or, even better, if you have room in your casing for another hard drive, you could add 500 Gb. and this would solve the immediate problem of storage space.  However, the operating life of a hard drive is about three years before failure.  You are fast approaching this figure.  Extra RAM will make a computer run more efficiently but not much faster.  Your processor is what dictates the speed. A three year old motherboard may also be getting a bit creaky.  Basically, you could be throwing good money after bad.
An external hard drive could be used to store all your pictures from your current hard drive leaving it with more space to operate windows.  If you decide to update to a new computer, then the external hard drive can be plugged in to this and away you go..  Check out PC World for external drives.  Aldi and Lidls are very competative for these items and have good spec. computers at bargain prices.