Don't do what I did.....

[Bayla]

I worked for about an hour last night on a project...I was trying to combine a few different techniques and at the same time produce a box with a lid lifting up to reveal what was inside.....I've tried this on and off for the last week or so and finally yesterday managed to achieve the effect I was hoping for. I was over the moon!

Went into the kitchen for a few minutes....came back to find that my computer had switched itself off for no apparent reason:eek: I had not saved the last 10 or more steps in my project & have to start again:mad:

So now I've started saving after every step....just in case.

Bayla

[kevq]

Bayla,
what a terrible thing to happen!
If you are a PC user, go to display, screen saver, power settings and switch the settings to never. I learnt the hard way, working on a project, hadn't saved anything. Knock on the door, took a time to deal with the caller, came back and my PC had switched itself off. Now like you I save every time I alter the layout.
Kev.

[Bayla]

Kev,

At the moment my settings look like this:

http://www.pixentral.com/hosted/1U78PqnLRfjwwK7gonrpb7rCAhFfNB_thumb.jpg (http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?picture=1U78PqnLRfjwwK7gonrpb7rCAhFfNB)

Are you suggesting I change all of them to never?

Bayla

[kevq]

Bayla,
my layout is different but the advice I was given by a computer technician was to turn of the ones you see in my screen shot and never to use hibernate.
Kev

http://img98.imageshack.us/img98/20/scrn7jz.th.jpg (http://img98.imageshack.us/my.php?image=scrn7jz.jpg)

[Bayla]

Kev,

Thanks. The computer has been behaving like that for a few weeks. I'll see if that makes a difference.

Bayla

[Carbone]

Bayla,

Did your computer went into sleep mode or was it totally shutdown ? If it's the later, you may have a little something wrong (virus or other malware). I suggest you run a series of anti-virus scanning, adware / spyware scanning and other stuff alike.

Ray

[Mary]

Hi Bayla
I was having a similar problem a couple of weeks ago. Late afternoon early evening my computer would shut down for no apparent reason. Then I looked at the file size of my latest PSE creation that I had been working on for several days. 196MB!!!! Including scratch files, clip board and bringing up images from my network I was overwhelming my system even with 1 GB of memory. After I knocked back the size of the file I didn't have the problem any more.

I am going to pay more attention to file size from now on :o

[TonyW]

Bayla: Sorry to hear about that. The only consolation is that when that happens to me doing it the second time is always quicker than the first :) . I live in the country and the power supply has a habit of "blipping" once in a while that was shutting me down. I solved that with a cheap UPS - only gives a few minutes of power but it takes care of the blips. The other cause of shutdowns can be overheating. It has been pretty hot in the UK recently and heavy duty Elements work does generate a lot of heat. Have you got good ventilation around your computer?

Tony

[JonE]

The monitor and disk settings won't hurt you, it's the system standby and hibernate that foul us up.

You probably have a screen saver setting on your monitor. You can get to this by right clicking on your open desktop (background), select Properties and then select Screen Saver. If you have this set to save your screen from being left on too long, then on the power setting the turn off option can be set to a long time like 3 or 5 hours. But the monitor going off won't affect your work - you can always turn the monitor back on. If you have a very recent monitor that controls power well and goes into a darkened screen/low power mode then setting power off to never should be OK.

The hard disks setting should be set to go off after some time of non-use. All this does is stop the disk(s) from spinning and when you move the mouse again they will spin up to working speed but there will be a light delay of a couple of seconds. This should not affect your work, but even so you should still save your work regularly, particularly before taking a break. If you have this set to never, the disks will stay running all day while you are away from home, or if you leave your computer at the office then they run all night till you come back the next day. If your computer serves as a system file server or web site server, you may want it to run constantly for readiness. You should follow the advice of any system administrator or pro who is advising you of course.

The hibernate and system standby modes are notorious for not working right and messing things up. You are supposed to be able to come back without interruption but depending on the computer model people frequently have bad luck meaning you have to reboot and lose any open/unsaved work. These two settings should definitely be set to never.

[Bayla]

Ray,

I thought at first the computer had merely gone into hibernation mode, but no, it had shut down completely. I ran a scan on it this morning and it picked up and disinfected one file with spyware.

Mary,

Didn't think to look at the size of the file I was working on...


Tony,

We very rarely get power cuts here.(I think you call them outages?) The computer is in a very cool room so I don't think that's the problem. Haven't tried to redo the project yet....thanks for the encouragement:)

Jon,

I've always had the screensaver set to kick in after one minute & password protected.....my kids aren't allowed unsupervised internet access so this prevents them getting on when I'm not around! I've reset the hard disks setting as you suggested & switched off the hibernate mode.

Thank you all for your replies.

Bayla

[Benny Pedersen]

Bayla,
my layout is different but the advice I was given by a computer technician was to turn of the ones you see in my screen shot and never to use hibernate.
Kev

http://img98.imageshack.us/img98/20/scrn7jz.th.jpg (http://img98.imageshack.us/my.php?image=scrn7jz.jpg)

Im sure that you didn't toke/take part in this personally, but anyhow allow me to shoot Bush like this:

If someone click on that picture (htt p://img98.imageshack.us/my.php?image=scrn7jz.jpg)
a SPAM site pop up (ad.yieldmanager.com about www,888.com), said:

Click ok to download our free Casino while browsing the site

Here in Europe, we have besides invented both water and electricity also some administration of justice :) . In US they may have the chair with electricity but apparent can't figure out how to use it over there, or the spammer maybe a lawless from the US department or what ? :eek:

Benny Pedersen,
PS:
It normally dosn't matter whether you click OK or Cancel to such question that pop up. The computer would often get infected anyway.

The best way to get your computer infected is on sites where the topic is porn or casino.

[Bayla]

Benny,

There was some discussion several weeks ago about the amount of spam & pop ups on Imageshack which is why so many of us are using Pixentral instead, especially once a clickable thumbnail was introduced which made it much simpler to post images.

Bayla

[Benny Pedersen]

Benny,

There was some discussion several weeks ago about the amount of spam & pop ups on Imageshack which is why so many of us are using Pixentral instead, especially once a clickable thumbnail was introduced which made it much simpler to post images.

Bayla

Thanks Bayla :)

I was only a newbee member here since April so that I didn't knew.
but I noticed the Pixentral when browsing your images. I think that it cost a little money to use that Pixentral gallery, so I used my Canon webspace instead but I only have 100 MB so I will need more space sometime.
.

[Bayla]

Benny,

Pixentral is free to use, although I believe that Carlos (?) is happy to take donations from anyone if they want to do so....

Bayla

[Wendy]

Hi Bayla ....

I changed over totally to Pixentral to avoid those pop ups !! :)

Wendy

[Carbone]

...and so far, no porn adds :)

Ray

[Dorrie H.]

Wish we could convince Kev to use Pixentral instead of Image Shack. I truly enjoy looking at all his creations, but hate the pop-ups that always happen when opening the image thru Image Shack. I have not had any pop-ups with Pixentral.

No offense Kev, I really enjoy your work, but sometimes I only view the thumbnail, 'cause I dislike the pop-ups so much.

Dorrie

[Bayla]

I also changed over to Pixentral....had no problems with it since I upgraded the computer, and for some reason my pop-up blockers refuse to block those Imageshack pop-ups:( I also like the large thumbnails you get with Pixentral: often you get a great picture without even having to click on them.

Bayla

PS. Good to see you back Wendy, hope you had a nice break.

[Wendy]

Hi Bayla ...

Thank you ... we had a great time :)

Wendy

[kevq]

Hi,
I seem to be getting some stick over my use of image shack.
I switched over to this site because I was fed up with the number of times that pixentral went down.
I will try using pixentral again but if it still behaves the same I will confine my posts to messages only, no images.
Kev.:(

[Carbone]

Kev,

Are you a subscriber here? Why not make use of the gallery instead? Else, there are several other alternatives. A Yahoo! Gallery, or MSN Photo book, etc.

Ray

[karen donnybrook]

Kev, please post your photos regardless. Your work is too good not to be seen.

[Grant]

Bayla

Many many years ago I learned the same lesson and in almost as hard a way. It was pre 1980 and i had just acquired my first personal computer. In fact it was the day I got it. I was so keen to use it I set off writing some code. I programmed for about 7 hours straight and a thunder storm struck. In a flash the screen went blank, the computer went off and then came back on and all my code was gone. So the 7 hours work took longer to write after that as i kept backing up.

I suspect it is no consolation but it does happen to all of us.

--

[Dorrie H.]

Kev,
I had no intention of hurting your feelings. I truly apologize if I have offended you.:o

If Pixentral does not work for you, then of course continue to use Image Shack. Obviously I didn't know you had had trouble with Pixentral in the past. As I said I enjoy seeing your work. You are an inspiration to a lot of people on this web site and they would be disappointed if you discontinued your image posting, as well as myself. It's hard to express one's self in these messages sometimes. Words can often be misinterpreted.:(

Dorrie :)