I hate Microsoft

So… what does that have to do with these photographs? I’ll tell you. Due to the recent spell of wet and windy weather, going to a reserve has been out of the question, so I’ve been catching up with some old scans. Actually, they are older than I care to admit, as I haven’t touched my dedicated film scanner for a couple of years. I get all enthusiastic, scan a few boxes and then find cleaning them up takes ages. I lose interest and go back to taking new images.

However, I did finally catch up with the slides from Chile the other week and I’ve been trying to spend at least some time every day going through those from Argentina. That was our last real holiday some 25 years ago and I would rather like to get them all done while I still have some recollection of the places we visited. As it happens, I don’t remember much about these at all, only we had recently left the Torres del Paine national park in Chile and crossed the border, where we went on a boat trip for a few hours. At one point we disembarked and were directed to follow a path through a pretty little wood. On reaching the other side, we were amazed to see a glacier in the distance. The surface of the lake directly in front was covered with blocks of ice in varying sizes. The photograph is featured at the top and it is quite deceptive, as I distinctly recall wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt at the time.

But I digress. I like to work on an image and then leave it for a few days before checking it one last time and deciding whether to add it to this site. I was just about to do this the other evening when I was told the PC needed to do a rather large update. Seeing as my husband was about to serve dinner, I left it to get on with it and about half an hour later I logged back in to find my monitor was far too bright and with a horrible yellow cast.

Never mind, I thought and pulled out my trusty Huey Pro – only the newly corrected colours lasted for a couple of seconds before changing again. A quick Google revealed this to be a common problem for people like me who use a third-party calibration device and for the moment there appears to be no solution. So… I only had one option left and that was to roll back the update (Fall Creations if anyone is interested) to the previous version of Windows 10.

Everything went back to normal and for a couple of hours, I was pleased with myself. Until I got another message to say the update was going to happen regardless and all I could do was put it off for a maximum of six days. I’ve just joined up to a forum where a MS employee is trying to help people with their problems, but I have no idea what is going to happen.

So, please enjoy these few photographs from a dim and distant past where nobody had a personal computer and software problems hadn’t been invented yet. They may be the last you will see for a while…