Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Eli's Little Helper

Softball season is officially upon us! I have purchased my first Dr Pepper six-pack of the year!

BEHOLD ITS RADIANCE!

Mmm... Sweet, sweet nectar...

When I'm at home, I only drink Dr Pepper as a treat/reward after a hard-fought softball game. Or batting practice. However, I do drink it fairly frequently at work, as kind of an afternoon pick-me-up.

I can quit any time. Really.


(Non-techies may feel free to ignore the following)

This also gave me an excuse to test my laptop's memory upgrade. See, I noticed that converting digital photos from RAW format to jpeg format was severely bogging down my laptop and making it to do anything else. I also noticed that my memory usage was up around 800MB during these conversions, and the laptop only has 512MB, which means it was using the hard drive as virtual memory, which is always very slow.

So I ordered a couple of 512MB modules, which I picked up today and installed during my lunch hour (despite the Dell website being down and therefore unavailable for reference - thanks, guys!). So far, it's exceeding expectations, as the laptop does not appear to be bogging down even a little bit, so I'm pretty damn pleased.

Now, the techie bad news: My PC crashed a couple of nights ago, just 5 days shy of six months continuous uptime. I was really looking forward to that milestone, but it was not to be. The PC's fine, it was just some crappy program that went wonky and brought everything down. I've upgraded to a newer version, and hopefully it'll be a bit more stable...

5 comments:

P. Drāno said...

A friend of mine was in Central Asia and people offered him some tea, which he politley declined. They said: "If you won't drink tes, where will your strength come from?"

four legs good said...

Speaking of downloading RAW photos, my laptop, with has 2 GB of RAM took quite a while to download some 150 odd photos today.

In the lab they have a card reader that is almost instantaeous. You pop the card in and the folder appears on the desktop. You just drag it off.

I might have to get me one of those thingees.

Eli said...

Oh, *downloading* them is not a problem, especially with the D200, which has USB 2.0. It's the converting them from RAW to jpeg that's problematic.

You have a 2GB laptop? Nice.


I forgot to mention that the upgrade actually makes my laptop more powerful than my PC - same speed (3.2GHz), same RAM (1GB), but the laptop has a better videocard (ATI Radeon 9700, vs. GeForce 5700 after the Radeon 9600 crapped out).

four legs good said...

Are you using CS2? I think it's faster than from photoshop 7. I bought a book on using Camera Raw in CS2- but I haven't had time to finish it. So I'll end of going to the lab and making one of the grad students help me.

What's hilarious is that I shot RAW yesterday, and when I looked at the files today they look like they need next to no tweaking.

Oh well, what the hell.

Eli said...

I'm using CS2 after, but I'm using a more Nikon-specific app to do the actual conversion.