Today has been a bit of back to the future as I had to dust down my old lap top and set it up for a meeting I’m have next week.  This might seem taking preparation to an extreme but I had several things I needed to sort out on the machine and I wanted to make sure it would work.

The first problem was would it start? The machine is circa 2007 and hasn’t been used for at least 6 months.  However, once it was plugged in – the battery was always a bit dodgy – away it went with the old familiar clunks and sounds of spinning as the hard drive sprung into life.    After 10 minutes, yes it really was that long, the Windows Vista OS settled down and appeared to be very stable.  I had switched the WLAN off so as to not get bothered by any updates I might be due and the machine seemed better for that.

The next problem was how to port a huge Adobe Illustrator file created on an Apple into an old Windows environment.  The first step was to reduce the size considerably which wasn’t too problematic.  Then save it onto a SD card and then open the file on the lap top.   This seemed to go quite well until it came to backward compatibility.  Up popped the dialogue box    warning that this might not go as planned, my words not the softwares.   Sure enough it didn’t and whilst the file opened it had put all the layers into one group – which was an unmitigating disaster.   Back to the drawing board.

Eventually I solved the problem by saving the file on the iMac into a more compatible version and things worked really well.  As a back up I also saved the file as a PDF and this seemed to be working ok.   So far so good.  The next step was creating an Access database on the laptop from a CSV I had exported out of FileMaker Pro.

Now for many years I was a bit of a wizard with Access.  I had mastered Visual Basic and could make Access produce some impressive results.  However, the last time I worked on an Access database was way before I had switched to Apple so, to say the least, I was rusty.  However, once I had got into swing of things all the old memories came flooding back and the final result, whilst very fundamental when it came to data management, at least looked quite slick.   I have to say the design interface of Access is far superior to the scatter brain approach of FileMaker.   I guess if I could bothered to sit down and really teach myself FileMaker I might change my views – perhaps.

So things didn’t take as long as I thought and the problems were manageable. Actually as a stand alone computer the lap top is really good.  Yes it is slow to start up and I wouldn’t like to do too much video editing on it but apart from that it does everything you might want from a laptop.  However, I guess if a switched on the LAN then things might get a whole more complicated as all those updates try and screw the machine up.  No best leave the internet alone and instead use the iPhone and iPad.

I have also come to some form of resolution about the way my art should move forward.   I’m going to abandon my attempts to master painting on a large scale.  Instead I intend to work in the  more intimate environment of my sketch books with ink, water colours and gouache.  I really suits the way I enjoy making art.

Anchors Awiegh