At least, not anything other than a very recent version. I am posting this just in case anyone is thinking of doing it. I am no fan of Microsoft to put it mildly, but Adobe has not endeared itself to me this morning either. I had decided to install an admittedly pretty ancient version of Photoshop Elements (12), which I had used on previous PCs, I won’t say happily because I have never liked Photoshop much anyway, it has never seemed very intuitive to me and I have preferred Corel’s PaintshopPro, but after the recommended restart, my PC would not boot beyond the startup screen at all. I let the PC attempt automatic diagnosis and repair to no avail, then rebooted in safe mode, but you cannot uninstall software in safe mode. A system restore to the point before the installation of Elements didn’t work either. Angst levels were rising fast. Was I really going to have to do a factory reset with all the work that entails? I can remember when setting up a new PC would take between two and three days in the Windows 7 era, gradually improving over the years – it now takes me just a few hours, but even so.
Googling revealed that I was far from the first victim and also led to a solution posted by someone called Larry to whom I am extremely grateful. It involves renaming certain files in safe mode, thereby hiding them and preventing them from loading on startup. I will happily pass the details on if you find yourself in this situation (but see pic for the files in question, of which I had only two).
Most serious problems (remember the blue screen of death?) I have had with computers have turned out to be the result of Windows updates, which are sometimes infuriatingly compulsory. Not so long ago one of them was reported to cause random deletion of files. You would think they would test these things properly. But whether or not Adobe is to blame, I had to go to my account to retrieve the Photoshop serial number where there should surely have been a headline screaming: “DO NOT EVEN THINK ABOUT INSTALLING THIS ON WINDOWS 11!”
I have now, of course, uninstalled Photoshop and won’t be going near it with a bargepole again. I don’t edit or like editing my photos very much anyway and do very little of it, but did want to erase a couple of objects from a scene and I thought Photoshop might be the best for the task. The latest version of Microsoft Photos now does a pretty good job of this anyway, and I also have Inpixio which does it better.
I have also tended to find that whatever Microsoft says a problem is, it almost invariably will turn out to be something completely different. Although I say so myself I am pretty good at this stuff – technical support people as often as not know less than I do and I end up calling them back to tell them how to make the fix so that they can pass it on. I once had one tell me I had too many external drives for my computer to cope. An hour later his colleague said that that was precisely what modern computers were designed to do, hence the relatively small built-in memories. I could go on for days.
This may be a precursor to a post which I might call Wildpilot after the excellent Trustpilot company ratings website. I’ll carry on here with the PC manufacturer Acer. I have no issue with the quality of their products and have a top-end Predator machine. I accept that hardware components failing is something that is occasionally going to happen. When this wouldn’t boot last year, it emitted a very specific series of beeps, like Morse code. I could not find a single person at Acer who knew what they meant, nor could I find anything online. In the end I had to have the machine collected, repaired and returned. It was around Christmas to be fair, but it took over five weeks! It turned out that the graphics card had failed. If someone had only known what the beeps meant they could have sent a new card to me the next day and I could have installed it myself.
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