Another Setback on the Photo Project
Last week I was too sick to work on digitizing my photos of cemetery markers. This week, the computer was too sick for it.
I began happily enough on Monday, zipping through all my Colorado photos. The flatbed scanner worked just fine for this, and the photos went smoothly to a temporary folder. From there, I labeled everything and moved the images into their permanent folders. I had set up several of these for towns in the state where my ancestors have lived, including Boulder, Cañon City, Denver, and Fountain.
On Tuesday, I sat down at the computer to scan a handful of Nevada photos. Instead of finding the desktop screen with the scanner icon, I encountered a black screen telling me the computer needed to be rebooted. I did so, and proceeded to scan the first photo. It did not go to the same temporary folder I had used the day before. Somehow the path had changed with the reboot. I tried it again. This time the black screen reappeared, but now it contained an ominous Hard Disc Failure message.
Well, this was discouraging. I was using a brand new computer, installed just the week before. What had gone wrong? Even my husband/tech advisor was stumped. He finally resorted to calling the manufacturer, and a repairman is scheduled to look at it on Monday. No more scanning until sometime next week unless I want to connect the scanner to a different computer (I don’t). So I spent the week on the other computer doing data entry from a few documents I have collected over the winter.
All is not lost on the scanning front, though. I am registered to attend a scanning workshop tomorrow. The Computer Interest Group of the Colorado Genealogical Society is hosting a day-long seminar on scanning, digitizing, and genealogy software products. Maybe I will pick up some good tips before I get too far along in my own project.
Teri, Too bad your work is delayed. The workshop sounds wonderful. If they had one near me I’d sign up. You can always learn something new.