Uploading Images at Events

Gilly B

Gilly B

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Gillian
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Searched around on here for anyone posting the same problem to no avail.

....My Acer 17" wide screen Lappy was out on location doing 13 family portraits today for a local school. Thing is, after the first CF uploaded the 1st family, the lappy slowed right down and even froze a few times. The whole thing had to be rebooted 3 times. One customer's hubby claimed to be a whizz on computers and offered his advice of uploading straight onto an external HD bypassing the Lappy's internal memory.

So.......Now I am back at home, I decided to experiment - and plugged my Western Digital 1TB and proceeded to upload the CF as if on location. Still painfully slow.

Can anyone throw some light onto why the uploading slows everything down and if using an external HD would be better and faster - of course that's assuming I am using it incorrectly.

What do you guys do? and how did you decide on this best method.

Thans - Gillian
 
Start at the begining,

Is the CF card ok? try another and see what happens.

Do you have another card reader you can try?

The laptop, do all other functions work at normal speed, internet etc?
Is the laptop hard drive getting near full?
Are there too many processes running in the background, msn etc?
Is the fan noisy on the laptop?
 
admirable said:
Start at the begining,

Is the CF card ok? try another and see what happens.

Do you have another card reader you can try?

The laptop, do all other functions work at normal speed, internet etc?
Is the laptop hard drive getting near full?
Are there too many processes running in the background, msn etc?
Is the fan noisy on the laptop?
Click to expand...

Thanks for responding. To answer in order:-
I was using 13 Sandisk CF cards which were all fine and were Extreme III ranging from 1GB - 4GB.

I was using an EPSON PCMCIA Adapter.

All other functions are working at normal speed.

No other programmes or processes running in the background.

Fan is very quiet.

Regards - Gillian
 
Gilly

Stupid question but do you have plenty of space left on your internal hard drive? Secondly have you defraged the hard drive recently. PC's can slow up dramatically with a badly fragmented drive. I find loading and unloading images on a PC really can cause problems fairly quickly with file fragmentation.

John C
 
Gilly B said:
One customer's hubby claimed to be a whizz on computers and offered his advice of uploading straight onto an external HD bypassing the Lappy's internal memory.
Click to expand...

load of tosh if he thought that would make it faster.. it still needs to hit the memory inside the laptop.

id go with what chappers says, is your laptop hard disk under 10% free space?
 
I belive the problem lay with the EPSON PCMCIA Adapter. Try using a USB2 or firewire card reader. You will be amazed at the difference in speed.
 
[B said:
snapzz[/B];1549467]I belive the problem lay with the EPSON PCMCIA Adapter. Try using a USB2 or firewire card reader. You will be amazed at the difference in speed.
Click to expand...

Ah, that's interesting snapzz. I will investigate that and look to get an alternative as you suggest.


xendistar - I have just got the details of my laptop and they are as follows:

Acer Aspire 9300
Running Vista Home Premium with SP1
Processor: AMD Turion 64 x2 Mobile Technology TL-52
1.60ghz
2.00 gb memory ram
System Type 32-bit operating system
Hard Drive is Hitachi SCSI Disk Drive with a capacity of 149gb and 3 partitions
Mass Storage Device Info: c/ total space -70gb (free space 39gb)
d/ total space - 70gb (free space 53gb)
File system NTFS

...and it was run off the mains power all day.

Most of the above is a foreign language to me, so any response from you guys will have to be translated into plain english - pretty please.

Any thoughts?
 
Just been googling firewire card readers and looking at the link below.

http://www.blueunplugged.com/p.aspx?p=120746#moreinfo

Does my laptop have to be SATA 400/800 or is referring to something like my Western Digital ext HDD which has ports on the back for SATA 400 & 800.

If my thinking is correct then, I would plug the WD into my laptop and the Sandisk Card Reader (link above) into my WD? I am not sure if that will work and will go off and try it. back in a minute....
 
Doh! I can't try it as I don't have one (yet) to try. However, I did try the HIGH Speed USB 2.0 CF reader (Jessops) I have and that is as slow as the PCMIA Adaptor.

I await your response :popcorn:
 
Gill, I'm just curious... Is the problem consistent with all of your CF cards, and are you sure the slow ones are genuine cards?
 
hepburn said:
Gill, I'm just curious... Is the problem consistent with all of your CF cards, and are you sure the slow ones are genuine cards?
Click to expand...

Yes, I am confident that all my cards (all Sandisk) were purchased from reputable retailers and I have them all registered with Sandisk.
 
No point in trying anything else until you rule out the card reader!
 
admirable said:
No point in trying anything else until you rule out the card reader!
Click to expand...

Okay - good point.

I have just uploaded all 13 CF cards onto my desktop PC using the CF slot on the front of the tower that has a multi card reader built in one of those slots under the DVD writer. All 13 were uploaded very fast and no problems.

I am prepared to go and buy a firewire card reader as per the link in one of the above posts. My only concern is will it fit into my laptop? Have I got SATA 400 or 800 installed? How can I find out if I have it? If not, how do I get it, or do I work with it plugged into my WD HDD which has the ports on the back for SATA?

I think I am digging myself into a hole here.:thinking:
 
If your laptop has a firewire port then the reader will fit, however while it's likely to be faster I doubt it will be that much faster.

How are you transferring the images, drag and drop via explorer, or a dedicated transfer program?

If d&d, try Downloader Pro from Breezesys http://www.breezesys.com/Downloader/index.htm (takes a bit of setting up when first used but after that will transfer and rename your images automatically)
 
Steep said:
If your laptop has a firewire port then the reader will fit, however while it's likely to be faster I doubt it will be that much faster.

How are you transferring the images, drag and drop via explorer, or a dedicated transfer program?

If d&d, try Downloader Pro from Breezesys http://www.breezesys.com/Downloader/index.htm (takes a bit of setting up when first used but after that will transfer and rename your images automatically)
Click to expand...

I use Canon Zoombrowser to browse the images and then select the ones that need to be downloaded straight into a folder set up for the event. It took almost 30 minutes to upload 81 RAW images. Other strange things that did happen, included - after the images had downloaded onto the laptop and still in Zoombrowser, some needed to be rotated to the correct orientation and the laptop either crashed and had to be re-booted or when they finished rotating and set up in a slideshow for the clients, some of the ones that had been rotated had gone back to their original orientation - very frustrating.
 
Try this: Download all images directly by drag and drop off your CF card onto your Laptop. Do this using card reader. Try initially with about 10 images just as a test. Make sure your laptop is connected to the mains and not running off the battery. Then try same again with Laptop running off the battery.

This is just a test to check if any difference.
 
Sounds like the lappy is running out of resources during the operation, how are you off for disk space/swap file? 2gb memory should be plenty but if vista is continually hunting on the hard drive...

Query, you sure it's a scsi hard drive? scsi is a technology that hasn't really been used for years and I'm not sure it was ever used for hard drives.
 
snapzz said:
Try this: Download all images directly by drag and drop off your CF card onto your Laptop. Do this using card reader. Try initially with about 10 images just as a test. Make sure your laptop is connected to the mains and not running off the battery. Then try same again with Laptop running off the battery.

This is just a test to check if any difference.
Click to expand...

Spent some time doing the above and it was within a second of each other for 12 images taking an unacceptable 1 min 59 secs.

I then tried the same with the card reader v PCMCIA Adaptor and that test was within 1-2 seconds of each other.

I then downloaded Perfect Disk for a 30 day trial and de-fragmented both drives in the laptop. I was shocked to see the report poor in a couple of areas. This has now changed to excellent in all categories.

I ran the same tests as above again, and whilst the times vastly improved - 40 & 45 secs respectfully, Still slow.



Steep said:
Sounds like the lappy is running out of resources during the operation, how are you off for disk space/swap file? 2gb memory should be plenty but if vista is continually hunting on the hard drive...

Query, you sure it's a scsi hard drive? scsi is a technology that hasn't really been used for years and I'm not sure it was ever used for hard drives.
Click to expand...

To enable me to list my laptop's internal organs, I went to a site called 'Look in my PC' and it run off the report which I copied. I have been into the Device Manager and confirmed it is a Hitachi SCSI which was installed in June 2006.

I don't know these things.. Is that bad? :shrug:

My poor brain - I will have to go to bed now as I have work in the morning.

Thanks for all your help.
 
Gilly

I take it you have an external hard drive. Copy some images from your internal hard drive to that. Then copy them back again. Is it faster than you are currently seeing with the card reader? Also how much space do you have on your hard drive?

There is nothing wrong with having a SCSI drive. It's just unusual that's all. SCSI was the fastest way to transfer data, but they were expensive.

By the way Windows has it's own defragger built in. You'll find it under
All Programes>Accessories> System Tools. ( Windows XP ,sorry can't help with Vista)

May be worth checking your memory.

http://oca.microsoft.com/en/windiag.asp

It may be a failing memory module . Run this test and see what it says. Best left to run itself as it may take some time.
 
I repeat,

admirable said:
No point in trying anything else until you rule out the card reader!
Click to expand...


Please read through the whole thread before making comments, that's five times Gilly has been asked about the available capacity on the hard drive!
 
Gilly

Just another thought, do you have a virus scanner running.

I had a problem several years ago with a computer running unusually slow. It turned out that a virus scanner was scanning incoming files. Not that this would normally be a problem but they were huge files (40Mb+) and this slowed things up considerably. We turned off the scan incoming files option and things returned to normal. (It was on a closed network so viruses from the input source wasn't a hazard).
 
If you're only downloading from cards, turning off scanning won't to any harm, it can be turned on again and it would be simpler to do.
 
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