For some time, I have been aware that my home computer was reaching its storage capacity with the number of digital photographs that I stored on it. The machine was showing signs of impending problems, reacting very slow to inputs, taking a long time to start-up, and move between programs etc.
I am no computer guru, what I know about computers could be recorded on a small SD card!!
I did know what options were available to me though, upgrade the current computer, or purchase a new one. The current model has been upgraded many times over the years; additional hard drives and RAM memory have been added to it, but was it now reaching the end of the line with the upgrade option?
I did seek some guidance on this matter and was told that the processor and motherboard that was in the old computer was now restricted what type of components I could add to it, basically no modern peripherals would work on it.
So, after some deliberation, the decision was made to purchase new, with this decision brought the unenviable task of deciding what to buy, it’s a minefield out there. After several weeks of reading, watching and listening to recommendations, I decided to purchase a computer from a company called Chillblast.
I contacted them on several occasions to discuss what I wanted and whet they recommended, this ended up with me placing an order with them for a nice new PC. This arrived 9 days later, and like a kid at Christmas, I could not wait to open it and get it working. This was a straightforward process, and the machine was soon up and running.
Now, the interesting part, I needed to transfer all the images, programs and folders from the old machine to the new one, surprisingly this went well, and in a day or so this was completed. All the programs and folders even opened and worked as they should.
Then, disaster, opening lightroom and starting the process of linking the new photo locations to the photos, my whole world came crumbling down. Error message after error message displayed on the screen, OMG, what do I do. Time to find an answer, YouTube being the resource of choice, long story short, after two days of turmoil and frustration I finally got all the images into lightroom, and working again, relief.
Then another major issue, the program would not backup the catalogue when I closed it, and yet again another window appears with a warning in it. I again sought some support via the internet, but nothing seemed to work, I then did some minor edits to some photos in Lightroom and closed the programme without the backup option, I was surprised that these changes were saved. My mind was in turmoil, could I use the program without using the back-up function? I was soon advised not to go down this route as I would lose all my date if the storage drive decided to die.
So, what do I do, I was stuck, then out of the blue I found a resource that spelled out a possible fix, in a step-by-step process that even I could follow.
I followed these steps, and amazingly, it worked the catalogue was backing up as it should, and I could edit the images, fan-dabby-dozie, I was well chuffed. It had only taken me 5 days to transfer my images over to the new computer and be able to edit and save these I Lightroom as you should.
The moral of the story, prepare well for any migration of information onto a new computer.
Hopefully this me sorted now for many years to come, and I don’t have to go through this turmoil again.
Oh, by the way, I found Chillblast Computers to be a great company to purchase from, they guided me through the selection process, gave very good advice, in my case, the computer was very competitively prised, it was built, tested and delivered in a very short time.
