Organising the 'puters

St Guillaume

I spent the morning 'playing' with the computers. Ever since I mended the big computer by reloading XP I've been meaning to get round to setting up a home network. I've got a bit of a cold so it was a good excuse to sit in the study with the heater on and sort the things out today.

The Gates bit was easy but my ISP isn't the most user friendly and doesn't know the meaning of the word 'simple' - maybe it's just anti-Gates, so many people are, but eventually I have managed to get it all up and running, the two 'puters are now talking to each other and I can spend many hours sorting out all the thousands of duplicated photographs we have stored on them. I'm sure they will both run much quicker when I get the photos organised and onto a couple of CDs freeing up hard drive space.

I don't know how long this is likely to take because I did try to start and every time I think about it, I think of another way of organising and filing them all. Should I do it by date? Maybe by location would make more sense? When I've finally got these all done, there are all the old photos that I want to scan in and store too. I don't think I can make my cold last long enough to do it all so it will probably take me many months.

I know there are lots of software options out there to help me organise all this media and I love MediaMonkey which has helped me sort out all the music we've got stored, I think Picasa will be the best option for photos - but of course I still need to decide exactly in what order to file all this stuff! More particularly how to file it so that we can both find what we are looking for next time we want it. It's lovely browsing through the photos though and especially to see what we have been upto in the last 11 months.