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Hi

Thanks for all your replies. Have used the brush tool as suggested and this seems to have worked, although not as ‘clean’ as a solution as I would have expected.

(Btw, realised i’m using Photoshop 7, although System Info says 5.1!)

That’s why I said hopefully it will work; even though you get the correct RGB values, brightness and saturation may still make it appear to be off and some further adjustments are needed.

Also, I was actually giving you navigation for Photoshop Elements 5 so that would be quite different from Photoshop 7, but all the same tools are there for the most part.

I would NOT do this. With any problems with accessing these drives would most likely clobber your links and you would NOT have access to them.

If you look around, you will see all kind of post about users losing their external drive and have a nightmare on their hands.

There is nothing wrong in copying them to a external drive but setting up that your “UserUserNameDocuments” being linked there NO way.

With them there and NOT linked, there should be no problem in opening, editing and saving to them, but not as the default location.

I have a networked system, and I use a older XP machine for my files/Print server, and I save 90% of my files across the network, but it is NOT my default location. I have to browse over to it but, it is no big deal for or the wife.

I also would not recommend it for an ordinary USB external but as I mentioned, as long as there is a good one for one backup, even if the external fails it is no problem at all (at least in XP since I’ve done it) replacing that external, verifying drive letter (change if needed to match old drives letter) and copying the backup onto it. Of course during the failure one would not want to allow the computer to make any new associations as far as file location goes when prompted for an available location.

What happens if you look at the drive using a windows file manager from a LINUX boot disc? I’m thinking you don’t need any permissions then and can access the files and copy them off and reformat the drive. There must be an easier way but that should get the job done.

I’ve had it happen a couple of times in ten years so I don’t know if its too common, but I also noticed right away that a new profile was loaded. It wasn’t damaged or anything, it just failed to find the established profile during bootup. In both cases a reboot fixed the problem, but of course that was right away and without making any changes or taking any action that might make the new profile have some persistence.

If a new profile is created because the normal one is damaged in some way or the loading procedure has a glitch then its more likely to happen again.

As long as they’re backed up, whatever drive or partition they are kept on is not much of an issue. I relocate mine in XP, Vista and 7 and all function about the same. Sometimes a program that installs will be hard-coded to put a custom storage or temp folder in the original default location but I don’t find that to be much of an issue and like being able to seperate OS and apps from data.

Did you look in System Properties>Advanced tab>Performance section settings…>Visual Effects tab?

I think the last item (Use visual styles on windows and buttons) affects the aero peek function and others on that list may as well.

edit: Dan Will’s post nails the tail to the donkey, disabling visual styles, if it works, will probably disable other features you don’t want disabled.

Yes, the XP windows explorer replacing the Win 7 explorer would be perfect for me. I keep reading that its the introduction of the Library concept that has messed everything up. The XP Explorer bar is so much more intuitive for me and does such a good job of listing related places based on current address that 7 is going to be my alternate OS until I can get it as good as XP. Screens are going wide, don’t put more horizontal toolbars in, in this case the quick tasks bar, when there’s plenty of room to the side and of course I don’t understand making the status bar less useful and sort of combining it with the old details section from XP. Whole line selection sucks rotten eggs too, no up one level button, but it is still in the Open and Save dialog boxes and by keyboard (Alt-UpArrow I think); thanks for the confusion MS!…the more I use it, the more I go back to XP–I think 7 works just fine, but not the way I want it to as far as the Explorer goes.

That sounds very similar to a problem I had with an HP c6700b desktop. I described it as if the system suddenly just lost contact with drives other than the main system drive. In my case Vista showed some signs of being flaky in the I-O protocols but putting 7 on it tore a hole in the fabric of space. Couldn’t ever find any direct reference to the problem anywhere except for a white paper on some HP mobile systems that had very similar I-O controllers with a known problem with I-O that could result in loss of data and function.

My solution was to put XP on that system and its been happy days ever since. So I suspect that it is a glitch in the drivers Win 7 is using so you might check with the mfg. of the mobo and see if they updated any of the chipset drivers to work specifically with Win 7 64-bit or you could even try the Vista 64-bit drivers and see if they work better.

No problem with 7 (32 bit Pro) and eSATA here either and I too suspect something in the connections or in the eSATA bridge of the external itself. Changing one variable at a time and testing should reveal the location of the problem which we already know isn’t the drive at least.

That’s a taller order and I’m not sure this will work for you and someone may know a better way but first check under Image>Mode to see if your gif is Indexed Color…. If it is, you’ll have to change it to RGB Color to use RGB values. Also if there is any tranparent areas you want to preserve as transparent, over in the Layers panel (lower right side of screen) there is a little light-colored square next to the word Lock:. Click on that transparency sqare to keep transparent areas from being colored. I’m assuming you only have one layer so it should be the default but select the layer needed otherwise.

Then on the left side of the screen should be the tools bar and at the bottom are two overlapping color squares. Click on the top color and the Color Picker should pop up. Enter your RGB values in the respective fields and click OK. Then select the brush tool from the tools bar and in the brush customizations bar along the top edge of the workspace you should see a Mode: window; click on the dropdown and choose Color as the Mode. Then adjust the brush size if needed and be sure opacity is at 100% and brush your color onto the image. When finished, change the gif back to Indexed Color… if that’s what it was.

That should do it in most cases. If it didn’t you might have seen the color replacement brush and you might want to try that. Use the Eyedropper to set the color you want to replace then set you RGB color on the other color patch and play with the mode settings and tolerance levels. I’m not as familiar with that tool so you would be learning as much about it right away as I could tell you.

For just a quick color scale change, open in full edit in 5.1 and under Enhance>Adjust Color>Adjust Hue/Saturation…, slide the Hue setting with Preview checked to see the result. Also try it with Colorize checked for more subtle variations..

Start with that and see if it does the job, if not get back with more specifics about what is required.

Read only wouldn’t prevent you from copying the file. I’ve heard a couple of times that SyncToy won’t complete the mission properly but have never seen an explanation. A very good alternative is Syncback free version and I would be surprised if it had problems but if it did there’s probably more of an explanation of what the problem might be in the log report generated.

http://www.2brightsparks.com/downloads.html#freeware (free version is about halfway down the page)

Ok, for like what seems centuries now, I’ve had a custom taskbar toolbar dropup with oodles of Explorer shortcuts in it. Its compact, off in the lower right corner, expandable without taking up more and more taskbar real estate, takes me wherever I’ve preloaded in two clicks, including any number of networked and NAS addresses.

So, other than single click, what is the advantage of pinning one or more Explorer shortcuts to the taskbar? And if one right clicks and pins multiple addresses to the list, that’s a nice way of doing things, but, how is it fundamentally different from what I’ve been doing for, well, centuries??

I’m just curious, maybe that its more automated now so its even easier to do so a lot more people will configure thier systems to use it more often?

If you have a XP disc you can use VirtualBox of VMWare Player and get a really good version of XP virtual going in 7. Since you started from scratch and still couldn’t get XP Mode to work, a direct solution is not apparent to me at least. Make sure the system date and time is more or less correct. VirtualBox and VMPlayer are componentized as far as non-virtual interface configuration goes and I don’t know if XP mode is similar or not but if it is, selectively disabling those interfaces can often point to the problem.

Intel X25 solid state drive will do the most to speed up a system boot and operations. It will also cost the most.