David's Images of the Day Photoblog
It was foggy when I woke up this morning. I took this picture using the Leica X2 using the in camera high contrast B&W mode. I find this useful to envision what a scene will look like in B&W in real-time rather than waiting till I get back to my computer and start processing images. Thom Hogan mentioned in one of his recent blogs that he often does the same thing.
I took this image from my back deck using a Nikon 1 V1 camera and 500 mm f/4 VR lens connected using the FT1 adapter. With the smaller sensor size in the N1V1 the effective field of view (FOV) is equivalent to using a 1350 mm lens on a 35 mm FX sensor camera. This image is not cropped — almost too much magnification to have the whole deer in the frame. The lens was supported on a monopod, and VR was turned on to help stabilize the image. The mass on the lower part of the doe’s neck appears to be a deer fibroma, thought to be caused by a papilloma virus infection. I am seeing more of these abnormalities on the local herd of deer.
I found this old color picture of me with my parents in a booklet of pictures from my Grandmother. The picture was taken when I was about a month old. The reds in this scanned image are pretty intense. Apparently the blue and green pigments fade faster than the red ones.
The Apricorn/Crucial data transfer program took about 4 hours make an image of my old hard drive on the new SSD drive. Access to the hard drive and memory for the W510 laptop is from the bottom. I replaced the old hard drive with the new SSD hard drive. I also checked the SIMMs installed and found two 2-GB cards. The other two cards are under the keyboard. So I did only have 8-GB of RAM installed. I should have looked up the instructions for checking on the RAM under the keyboard. Instead, I did it the hard way by removing all screws on the bottom. In the process of separating the top and bottom of the laptop case a ribbon cable became separated from its connector. I couldn’t figure how to reconnect the ribbon cable until I realized that the keyboard pops off after removing two screws from the bottom. With the keyboard removed reconnecting the ribbon cable was much easier. I put everything back together, and turned the computer on. I was amazed how quickly the computer booted up. Everything with the computer seemed snappy. I’m not sure how much of the increased speed is due to the new SSD hard drive, and how much is due to the data on the hard drive being defragmented during the data transfer process. I ordered four 4-GB SIMMS so I could upgrade the RAM in the computer to 16-GB, and then went to bed.
The computer was still on when I checked it in the morning, however there was no response when I tried to enter my password. I powered the computer off, removed the keyboard cover – the easy way this time and checked the ribbon cable connection. It appeared to be loose. I realized that I hadn’t locked the ribbon cable connector. After putting everything together again, I powered the computer up and everything worked. If the SSD hard drive failed, I also had the option to use the old hard drive.
The Ultra Bay hard drive caddy arrived in the mail. I didn’t expect it until next week. It was simple to install the new 1-TB hard drive into the Ultra Bay caddy, remove the CD/DVD from the Ultra Bay slot on the computer, and replace it with the new Ultra Bay hard drive caddy. When I turned the computer on, it recognized that a new device had been installed and installed new drivers. After waiting a bit, I tried to open up the MMC storage management program to set up the new hard drive. The storage management module didn’t open – locked up trying to connect to the virtual drive manager. I rebooted the computer – it still didn’t work. I rebooted the computer, to check if I missed some setting in the BIOS. It was taking too long for the computer to shut down, so I forced the power off by holding the power button down. This was a big mistake. After checking the BIOS and not finding anything I let the computer continue to reboot. Nothing – the new SSD hard drive was not recognized. I tried twice more, still nothing. I didn’t panic. I put the old hard drive back in and rebooted. This time the new 1-TB hard drive in the Ultra Bay was also recognized.
I went online to the Crucial support site and found a comment that the SSD drive will go into a “safe mode” to prevent data corruption if the power goes off unexpectedly. That is probably what happened when I forced the power off. The instructions on how to reset the SSD drive were to 1) power the laptop but hold it in the BIOS setup mode for 20 minutes. 2) Turn the computer off. 3) Remove the SSD drive for 30 seconds. 4) Reinstall the SSD drive. 5) Repeat steps #1 and #2. 6) Allow the computer to reboot. This worked!! Also, the new 1-TB drive in the Ultra Bay was recognized. I formatted the 1-TB hard drive as D:-drive to be used for data. The OS, program files, and cache will be on the new faster SSD C:-drive.
For the last week I have been hearing a knocking sound from my travel laptop computer (Lenovo ThinkPad W510). It actually sounds like a car knocking when climbing a hill when using low octane fuel. When I have heard this sound before, it was a precursor to the hard drive failing (often catastrophically). My last backup (disk image) was 2 weeks ago, so the first thing I did was make a new backup. I would love to be able to do incremental backups, however my Lightroom catalogs contain over 500K images. Even though I only keep normal sized preview images in the catalog, it is a lot of small files. Because of the large number of files, backups can take days. My workaround it to make a full disk image backup. This is sector based, not file based and only takes 2-3 hours.
I actually planned to replace this computer with a new Lenovo W520 computer back in August, however Lenovo failed to deliver the computer on time before I left for the Fall 2012 Semester at Sea Voyage. UPS tried to deliver the computer after I left. I ended up having some long phone calls to Lenovo from the ship (at $2.50/minute). The computer was returned, and ultimately I was refunded for the cost of the computer (but not the phone calls). So what to do with the current computer? I decided to try to upgrade the current computer with a new 512 GB solid state (SSD) hard drive, and a second 1 TB hard drive. The second drive would go into an Ultra Drive slot, replacing the CD/DVD drive. This should give the current computer some additional life, and having a primary SSD drive and a second data hard drive some improved performance.
I ordered a new 512 GB Crucial solid state (SSD) hard drive, a 1 TB Seagate hard drive, and an Ultra Bay hard drive caddy via Amazon. I have Amazon Prime, so featured Amazon prime items get free 2-day delivery. I was pleasantly surprised when the two hard drives arrived in less than 24 hours via US Mail (USPS). The Ultra Bay caddy is coming from China, so will take longer.
The Crucial SSD came with Apricorn Data Transfer software and a USB/Hard Drive connector to make an image of my current hard drive on the new SSD hard drive. The process was relatively simple, and after 4 hours I had an identical image of my current hard drive. Tomorrow, I will swap the hard drives and see if the process works.
One thing that I need to worry about is that some software in an “ET calling home mode” compares processor s/n, hard drive s/n, etc to decide if the software is pirated. I have heard of some folks finding out that some of their programs no longer work because the software thinks that it has been illegally copied.
The other thing that I need to check into when I have the computer open is the amount of installed RAM. I purchased this computer with 16 GB of RAM (since I was going to be using Windows 7 Pro 64-bit). I was surprised to see Task Manager only indicating 8 GB installed — Strange. Did some of the memory in the computer go bad, and needs to be replaced?