Two and a half weeks in

New Computer was delivered on the 12th, and by this week I’ve finally got enough transferred/installed to do most of my work on it.

Old Computer never actually got a real name (Windows called it ERIN-PC by default, 9 years later and I didn’t change it), so it seemed like a good opportunity to name both of them together.

…the bigger, sturdier, older solid-black computer is Gideon, and the skinnier, more-powerful, younger solid-black computer that’s been busily absorbing Gideon’s settings/data is Harrow.

(Apparently not enough people in my internet circles have read the Gideon the Ninth series, but (a) you should do that, it’s great and (b) this is very funny on multiple levels that you will appreciate after reading.)

Had a brief scare with Paint Shop Pro not functioning — it installed, and seemed like it was running, but once I started trying to work on comics it became clear that a bunch of the tools weren’t working. Like…the brush. And the eraser. And the text creator.

Did a general uninstall/reinstall. It didn’t help. Did an uninstall, then a Google-assisted hunt through the registry to find all the places where Jasc would’ve put keys and delete them, then a reboot, then a reinstall. That worked!

Comparative screenshots:

             

(Gideon’s screen is physically larger, but Harrow’s is more pixel-dense, so it comes out to the same width and a tiny bit taller.)

There’s some minor display differences — e.g. the narrower bezels around the frame of each open file — and function differences — you can see the disappearing “expand/contract” button next to the “close” button on the Layer and Tool Options menus. (Haven’t actually used that for years, so no big loss…) And there are changes in “this window/option won’t be active unless the mouse cursor is Right Here” that are gonna take some getting used to.

But it works! I can brush and/or erase things again! The only remaining hangup was that it wasn’t registering “drag a file into the program window means open it” — and that comes back when it’s run on compatibility settings for Windows 7.

Really wish I could find the details of the specific coders who put together this release of Paint Shop Pro. You folks wrote a program so clear and solid that a machine from 20 years in the future, multiple generations of operating systems later, still understands how to pick it up and get it running. That deserves a shoutout by name.

Other little updates:

• Having to switch every device between 1 USB port is annoying as expected — definitely gonna get some new converters — but in the meantime, it’s manageable
• The power cord is USB-C, which means it can plug into any of the 4 existing ports; turns out it was easy to make my Executive Assistant lose interest, I just had to move it away from His Side
• Forgot that World Community Grid doesn’t install with default limits; the poor fans on this machine went nuts a few times before I tracked down the problem and told it that no, it is not allowed to use 99% of the CPU when it has the chance
• Used to be stuck in a 7-day trial window to give different filetypes more aesthetically-pleasing icons, but this time I did it with the freeware FileTypesManager
• I have switched to making art over here, and ohhhh yeah, Harrow is noticeably faster
• Photoshop opens in seconds, instead of minutes. Batch actions now get whipped through in the blink of an eye. PSP only took a couple seconds to save a file anyway, but now it’s half a second.
• I am so looking forward to the most resource-intensive task in Harrow’s immediate future: Exporting A 192-Page PDF From InDesign