[Jome]

Congrats on the mirror

I like my version but I do need to work more with it

Thanks Allen,

I just need to find the correct adaptall to use it with my K-3.

It is very light related to his focal lenghts.

[Marcus Rowland]

Received a slightly ludicrous amount of lenses etc. from three different job lots, total spend about £65:

Tamron 28-200 3.8-5.6 AF for Sony/Minolta - working well
Adaptall Extension tube for SP90/25 (takes it to 1:1 macro) - looks OK, don't have the lens but everything moves correctly etc.
Adaptall x2 teleconverter - OK
Adaptall 70-210 4-5.6 - OK
Adaptall 28-70 3.5-4.5 - OK
Sigma 70-300 3.8-5.6 AF for Canon - giving error 99 on digital bodies, haven't tried 35mm yet.
Olympus digital 14-42 for 4/3rds - OK
Zuiko 1.8/50 for OM1 etc. - sluggish but otherwise OK
Set of Kood 67mm close-up lenses - OK
Ozek 80-200 5.5 M42 - OK
Sigma 28-70 for Contax/Yashica - slight mistiness, might be fungus
Sigma 28-70 for OM - OK
Jessops x2 converter for Contax/Yashica - OK
Tokina 70-210 for CY - OK but cosmetically poor

Plus a half-dozen filters and another 4 lenses that have obvious faults and went straight to the big box of crap which will eventually become a job lot of faulty lenses...

And picked up another Sigma 70-300 3.8-5.6 AF - mount claimed to be Pentax but I won't know for sure until I get it - from Cash Converters web site - they somehow listed it at £7.99 plus delivery. I thought it was worth taking a chance at that price...

[ZombieArmy]

I've been forced to finally upgrade our aging (aged??) Acer Windows 7 laptop to something that can boot up in less than twenty minutes.

To be fair a simple upgrade to an SSD would have solved that issue too.

[Jome]

To be fair a simple upgrade to an SSD would have solved that issue too.

I second that!

[kadajawi]

To be fair a simple upgrade to an SSD would have solved that issue too.

That's hard to say. It could be some crappy old Pentium based laptop, where no SSD in the world will fix it. An SSD could make things better, but it won't fix it.

I've had an Atom based (newish) convertible for review, which I refused to write something about. An SSD wouldn't have fixed that thing (it had an eMMC, so it's at least flash based). Quite a shame, but that CPU was a massive letdown.

[ZombieArmy]

That's hard to say. It could be some crappy old Pentium based laptop, where no SSD in the world will fix it. An SSD could make things better, but it won't fix it.

I've had an Atom based (newish) convertible for review, which I refused to write something about. An SSD wouldn't have fixed that thing (it had an eMMC, so it's at least flash based). Quite a shame, but that CPU was a massive letdown.

I mean going off experience, even with older computers a 20 min boot time is usually caused by an old install of the OS on a drive that's reaching capacity or dying. SSD will make even a 98 machine boot like lightning.

[kadajawi]

I mean going off experience, even with older computers a 20 min boot time is usually caused by an old install of the OS on a drive that's reaching capacity or dying. SSD will make even a 98 machine boot like lightning.

Agreed. If it's a hard drive too much fragmentation too. But it COULD also be CPU limited, though probably not the only reason why it is so slow. Uninstall everything unnecessary and then defragment the hard drive. See if that has helped. Then you can install an SSD. However it would be interesting to know the CPU. How much RAM the system has. etc. That can determine if it is worth saving the machine.

In any case, if you want a decent experience, then you need to spend money. I really fell in love with the HP Spectre x360 13t (2018/2019). If you're looking for a portable laptop, that thing is worth a look. Though Apple does some amazing screens – my work laptop is an old MBP 13", but despite the performance being meh and the keyboard being... acceptable, it's a dream to edit images on. Because of that screen.

I was hoping to get a Surface X Pro, but sadly I won't. That's an exciting new machine, though probably way too expensive for what it is.

[MikeyBugs95]

Agreed. If it's a hard drive too much fragmentation too. But it COULD also be CPU limited, though probably not the only reason why it is so slow. Uninstall everything unnecessary and then defragment the hard drive. See if that has helped. Then you can install an SSD. However it would be interesting to know the CPU. How much RAM the system has. etc. That can determine if it is worth saving the machine.

In any case, if you want a decent experience, then you need to spend money. I really fell in love with the HP Spectre x360 13t (2018/2019). If you're looking for a portable laptop, that thing is worth a look. Though Apple does some amazing screens – my work laptop is an old MBP 13", but despite the performance being meh and the keyboard being... acceptable, it's a dream to edit images on. Because of that screen.

I was hoping to get a Surface X Pro, but sadly I won't. That's an exciting new machine, though probably way too expensive for what it is.

I had a 2016/17 Spectre 15t with an i7 and it is a very nice laptop but unfortunately it was only a dual core mobile processor with an older low power Nvidia GPU. It's a good laptop for sure but unfortunately not powerful enough for what I wanted. I went with that one over the same year XPS 15 because it was cheaper for the specs and I wanted a 2-in-1. This year I upgraded to the 2018/19 XPS 15 with an i7. A huge jump in performance comparatively. A desktop level processor with a pretty good Nvidia GPU. Darktable operations that would slow down the Spectre the XPS handles without a problem. There are some teething pains with the XPS (as many people know) but it's a wonderful computer. After I bought it, I found out that the same year Spectre was also available with the same specs too.

[kadajawi]

The one I had had the 8th gen low voltage CPU... i7 8765U or something like that. As a quad core it wasn't bad, though graphics was of course on board. I wanted something really portable rather than a desktop replacement, as I was travelling a lot. Those dual core Intel CPUs aren't terrible, but two cores just isn't enough in many instances. As for Darktable... I thought Lightroom was slow. Then I tried several other raw converters as I was trying to figure out how they deal with the HUAWEI P30 Pros raw files and its color issues, and foud out how poorly most performed. Oh boy I think Darktable was amongst them. If only Lightroom Classic wasn't a subscription thing. As for the HUAWEI... I figured out, that the ultrawide and regular lens had vignetting that included color shifts... once that was corrected (CornerFix to the rescue!) everything was fine.

The XPS are fine machines, but for some reason I never really got into them. Maybe I will get the chance to try one.

Btw., when I upgraded my desktop, I used my old laptop SSD (which I slimmed down a lot, but it still wasn't that fast) to boot the old desktop components for some tests. It started incredibly fast, despite being an old Windows 10 installation that was upgraded from Vista to 7 to 10... on an entirely different platform. Uninstalling cruft, when combined with reasonably fast hardware, can do wonders. Meanwhile, the Windows installation that was slow on the old hardware, on the same relatively slow SSD, booted much faster on the Ryzen hardware. Switching that 500 MB/s SSD to one that does 3500 MB/s made quite a difference too.

tldr: There are many possible bottlenecks, we would need to know what computer it was to be able to figure out where it makes most sense to upgrade. The biggest changes can usually be seen by switching to an SSD though.

[jeallen01]

I second that!

Me too!!!

[bdery]

A nice t-shirt I got for participating in the PPG relaunch contest. Same logo, much larger on the back.

[c.a.m]

A nice t-shirt I got for participating in the PPG relaunch contest.

Félicitations, congratulations!

Nice.

[Jonathan Mac]

To be fair a simple upgrade to an SSD would have solved that issue too.

It wouldn't have solved the issue of Microsoft ending W7 support this coming January, or that Anti-Virus software which supports W7 would mean paying through the nose to get updates for the installed version rather than having access to newer and superior software that's made for W10.

That's hard to say. It could be some crappy old Pentium based laptop, where no SSD in the world will fix it. An SSD could make things better, but it won't fix it.

I've had an Atom based (newish) convertible for review, which I refused to write something about. An SSD wouldn't have fixed that thing (it had an eMMC, so it's at least flash based). Quite a shame, but that CPU was a massive letdown.

It's an i5 processor 2410M with 8 gigs of DDR3 RAM and was a pretty good performer in it's glory days. Buying a really cheap laptop is a false economy because the accumulated OS updates and ever-more resource-hungry software will slow it to a crawl much sooner than it will on something with more power. Looks like that one was bought in 2011 so did pretty well to survive until 2019.

[Benz3ne]

Not really an acquisition for me but found my better half's Olympus OM-10 in the loft, along with a 50/1.8 Zuiko lens, a Tokina (IIRC) zoom, Cobra 400D (again, IIRC) flash, remote trigger and UV filter. Everything looks wonderfully clean, and has survived at least 5 house moves (from her uni accommodation to her parent's house, from her parent's house to our old house, from our old house to storage, from storage to our new house).
I need to buy batteries and film to test it out, but I don't think she's used it whatsoever so will be interesting to see how it goes. She reckons she wouldn't have paid as much as £30 for the lot, which I can believe; she's a ferocious bargain hunter.

[Chris_K]

Well, I didn't actually plan it but somehow I have bought the DA21! And since the seller also offered three A-series lenses at very good prices..... Yeah
I have quite a few lenses for Single-In challenges now