They live to ride again

Not much more than two weeks ago, I had a 'computer corner' in my study, which looked like this:

A bulky corner desk, great for a desktop PC but useless for anything else and taking up a lot of space; an eleven year old Dell PC and screen bought in May 2007 and still running the defunct Windows Vista; and an Epson scanner (left) and Epson printer (centre right) bought in September 2007. Out of view, bookshelves crammed with books and maps on every wall of the room. Bookshelves more than crammed - for some time I hadn't had enough space for everything. And things on the floor, such as big plastic boxes full of folders for my papers.

I'd had it in my mind for months to clear that corner, and buy myself some extra bookshelving.

The moment came to put that plan into action. By the end of June, the PC and its desk had gone. And the things on the floor elsewhere in the room had (temporarily) been shifted into the empty space now made.

It looked very strange at first, but I'm used to it now. I haven't yet done anything about new bookshelving. But I will during August.

In the picture above you can see the scanner and printer. Even though of the same ancient vintage as the PC, they still work fine. So they should. They were at the time Epson's finest offerings for the amateur photographer. They cost me a fair bit of money: £331 for the scanner (an Epson Perfection V700) and £253 for the printer (an Epson Photo Stylus 1400). I was reluctant to part with them, if they could be made to work with my Microsoft Surface Book laptop, Verity. I was fairly confident these Windows Vista devices would cope with Windows 10, but I couldn't be certain they would work with full functionality. It might have to be just a generic affair, with no bells and whistles.

If they didn't work with my 2016 laptop, then I'd have to consider whether I would replace them. And that would be a difficult decision. There was no point in having a run-of-the-mill scanner that couldn't give me great results when scanning old prints and transparencies. And there was still a lot of that to do. But the cost! Oh dear... And the printer. It was rare now for me to produce a photo print - the ink cost was high, and I preferred viewing my vast photo collection on a screen. I'd produced a set of prints a few months earlier, to fill some IKEA picture frames that I'd discovered in the attic and wanted to hang in my lounge - almost the only physical evidence that I did any photography at all. But since then? One or two letters typed, printed, and posted? It wasn't enough to justify spending big bucks on a new printer. That said, could you really do without one entirely?

These difficulties did not arise if the scanner and printer would work with Verity.

It all depended whether Epson still provided dedicated drivers for them that were compatible with Windows 10. I visited their website. Ah, I was in luck. I downloaded the drivers for these particular machines and installed them on Verity. Now to plug the USB cables in, the scanner first. I switched the scanner on, tapped the Epson scanning app on the laptop screen, and crossed my fingers.

Hurrah! I was in business. I chose the 'Home' setup, and went on to scan no less than seventy-one prints from Mum and Dad's photo albums, containing shots from the 1980s of their doings while on holiday, their bowling club activities in Liphook, and sundry get-togethers with friends. Some of these pictures showed me, when I was married and visiting them from London. There were many shots of my late brother and his (then) very young family. Shots I hadn't seen before. How strange and distant it all seemed. Was that really me in those pictures? It all looked sunny and happy. Were we all putting on a brave front, or what? Well, I didn't remember any sharp disharmony: everything of concern was in the background, slowly building up to a crisis, but meanwhile easily hidden.

And the scanner was clearly working well. The results looked very good, and - this was most welcome! - the scanning process (at 300 dpi anyway, perfectly appropriate for 1980s prints from Boots) was much swifter than before. Those seventy-one scans took me less than two hours on and off, including extraction from the albums and tidy replacement. In the 'old days', with the desktop PC, it would have taken twice the time.

The printer, essentially a simpler device, worked beautifully, just as before.

Well, that was a buying decision sidestepped, and a big replacement expense avoided! Big and bulky they might be, but I'd been unhappy about making do without a high-quality scanner and printer.

The rest of my 'computer equipment' was now reduced to this minimalist collection:

The scanty line-up:
# My laptop Verity
# A case to put her in (containing also various small accessories, including a small hard drive for post-processing backups)
# Two larger but still easily-portable hard drives A and B, between them holding my entire photo and document archive.

The only thing missing on the table above was a powered huge-capacity hard drive for six-monthly backups of everything, that I could securely stow away somewhere. I'll get one before the next General Backup is due.

My phone Tigerlily - really a little computer, of course - is also part of the 'computer equipment'.

Now it's done, I'm glad that I got rid of the 'computer corner'. It had been a relic of when my house was in Mum and Dad's hands. Here is a picture from Christmastime 2007, showing the corner desk already in position, with Dad's PC on it and his diminutive printer off to the left. The people are my nephew Michael and Dad himself, with a blurred reflection of my niece in the oval mirror.

I'd been reluctant to dismantle anything my parents had created. But lately that reluctance has started to abate, making change possible.

So what kind of shelves shall I put in? Something posh from John Lewis. or something cheaper from B&Q or IKEA that I'll need to assemble? I'm inclined towards John Lewis, or a similar kind of store. And I will look at second-hand furniture warehouses, of course. But I can't see myself investing in flat-pack shelving, and puzzling over hard-to-understand assembly instructions. I certainly don't want blisters from screwing the bits together, assuming they are all there.

Some might say: why don't you redecorate the room first? No, let's not go there.