As I slowly transition from film to the digital a new look at how I was working was required. I wanted to use Lightroom for its cataloging system. All the other features seem nice but the file management is what really attracted me. Unfortunately Adobe doesn’t support Linux and so a move to Windows was required. I haven’t used Windows for years running Linux Debian or a variation of that for at least the last ten years. Currently I have been using Ubuntu.

Before I get into Lightroom itself I had to first setup Windows. Since I had no working version of Windows installed I decided to due a fresh install of Windows 10 on its own partition. The install went fairly easily but then the problems started. I bought Adobe CC and installed Lightroom and Photoshop. Since I had no experience with Lightroom everything seemed foreign to me. I imported a small collection of images and started to learn. At first it seemed pretty nice but as I was working I started to get random freezes. The only solution was to power down the computer and reboot. Fortunately, I never lost any data but it was most frustrating and I couldn’t find a solution. Also I was using Linux for everything else and it never froze on me.

I removed everything except Lightroom and Photoshop. I had installed Bitdefender, Backblaze, Firefox, Thunderbird, XAMPP and a few other programs so I could do the things in Windows I was doing in Linux. But I was still getting random freezes and getting frustrated. I ran sfc scannow a couple of times a day, replaced the graphic card, did a complete reinstall of Windows 10, updated all drivers and still keep freezing. I was about to give up and stay with Linux when I got the idea to check the firmware versions of my hardware. I have Windows and Linux on one solid state hard drive and use a separate hard drive for my photographs and documents. I updated the firmware on the solid state hard drive and amazingly it has worked. I don’t know why the firmware seemed to only affect Windows and not Linux but it did.

I am now using Windows more and in future posts talk about how I am making the move to Lightroom.