My Duh Moment.

[sheepdog 10]

So, couple weeks ago as I mentioned, I got a new computer. I'm finally getting used to it and half way starting to like it. But it had only 4 USB ports in it, and I really needed more. There were 2 other ports in the back side of it, that I had no idea what they were for, USB port wouldn't fit, so I thought maybe I could get some sort of adapter to make them work. So we headed back over to Best Buy and after standing around for what seemed like ages I finally got a clerk to help me, I showed him the kind of computer I'd gotten and told him I need more ports and was wondering what the odd size ones where on the back, which he told me were for additional monitors, which made absolutely no sense to me, why would you need 2 more monitors on one computer, anyway, then he proceeded to show me where there were 2 more USB ports on the side of the computer that I hadn't ever noticed. I felt like a complete dumb *bottom*. And I told him I did too, and he just laughed and said, that's ok. Guess I'm not the first idiot he's seen. At least he was kind about it. See, and ya'll think I'm joking when I say I don't know anything about computers. I'm not, really!

[k_nitin_r 8]

sheepdog,

You must be glad that you did not get a laptop instead of an all-in-one desktop because most laptops have only 4 USB ports, unless you add more with a USB hub or with a docking station.

There are typically ports for connecting a monitor, television, or projector, and ports for external hard disk drives, both of which look a little like USB ports though you would probably be able to tell from a closer look at the port that they are different. Lenovo came up with a pretty interesting design in which they have one of the eSATA data storage disk ports to double up as a USB port in some of their laptops - you can hardly tell that a USB port can fit in there till you have read the documentation or have had somebody tell you. It makes you wonder why more manufacturers don't do it and why it isn't a part of the eSATA standard. Then, there is the matter of USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 ports - why would the manufacturers provide USB 2.0 ports when they could have it completely loaded with USB 3.0 ports? It's probably a cost saving design thing, but it cannot possibly cost that much more for after all, it is just a few USB ports.

Often, the provision for additional monitors is because the ports are different. There's the HDMI port, the VGA more, a DVI port, so if you had three different kinds of monitors, you could use them all at once through each of the different ports. Then, there are also monitors that work through the USB port, so there's that too. If you have a set of eight USB ports, you can use them all up to connect eight additional monitors.

[sheepdog 10]

Thanks for the explanation. Yes, those 2 extra ports do look a great deal like regular usb ports. Had me fooled. Which of course, doesn't take much.

Little by little I am figuring this computer out though. My biggest problem is I really miss my photo editing program. I can't figure out how to use the one I have now. Eventually I find things that I need but it sure is a struggle.

[k_nitin_r 8]

There are primarily two different kinds of photo editing software. One kind gives you pre-defined transformations that you can make to a photograph, such as red-eye removal, blurring and sharpening of the image, adjusting the brightness and contrast, and applying filters to turn the photograph into a black-and-white image or to apply a sepia filter to the picture. The other kind of photo editing software is actually full-fledged graphics editing software like Adobe Photoshop or Corel Paintshop Pro and lets you use the whole set of drawing and editing tools to alter images. The former is easy to find - Google's Picasa lets you do a whole lot of transformations while making uploading of images easier too. For the latter, Adobe Photoshop is the best that is available while other alternatives are compromises.

[sheepdog 10]

I've just been using the Microsoft program that I got with the computer, downloading them from the camera to pictures, in Library. What is annoying me right now is I haven't been able to figure out how to rearrange pictures in the albums. In my old program I could open up 3 or more albums at a time and just drag and drop pictures from one to another. Can only open one now. I usually take pictures of more than one litter of pups at a time, then rearrange them into individual breed albums so I can find them when I need them. Now I only have a few albums and never know where my pictures are. I also hate the crop feature, in my old program I could just draw the crop, now I have to adjust the size on the crop that comes up automatically when I click on crop, and it takes longer to adjust their box than it did to draw one of my own.

 

Amazingly enough, my very old Photo draw software still works, I can use it to make nicer graphics for my web site with borders and all that jazz, but I need a simple quick one to touch up photo's to send to customers.

[k_nitin_r 8]

For editing photographs, most people use Adobe Photoshop. It's price is quite steep, but I think they have a free Adobe Photoshop Express edition which is very limited in its abilities but is enough for basic photo editing. For managing albums, I've seen Picasa, by Google, provides the ability to manage photographs into albums. Picasa also provides the basic photo editing that Adobe Photoshop Express edition has so you might want to take a look. Google eventually drops the desktop applications in favor of web based utilities. In the early days, high-speed Internet access was difficult to obtain and so pictures had to be scaled down to a size that can be easily transmitted over the Internet. However, now we can get access to high-speed Internet access from just about anywhere, unless you are in the country side of a third world nation. It is therefore possible to upload pictures at their full size and resolution to an image hosting provider and have the ability to edit and scale the images while the images reside on the servers of the image hosting provider. It also serves as a backup copy just in case you have a disk crash and do not have any other copies of the photographs.