According to a news blog post at CNet, the average American household has 994 digital photos, stored on CD’s, DVD’s, Websites & hard drives, holding about 3 to 4 years worth of photos. Now, for the everyday household this may seem ‘average’, but after a quick snoop through my digital photos on my laptop, I have approximately 8048 photos of my own, a little above the average 994 for an entire household.

Now as these 994 photos are supposedly taken over 3 or 4 years, lets assume the latter, as I too have digital photos since 4 years ago. This would mean that each household takes 248 photos per year with their digital camera, supposedly on holiday and the odd family outing. Seeing how the average household has 2 children, lets assume one is old enough to have their own camera, and there is also one camera for both parents. So, with two cameras snapping away, thats 124 photos per camera, per person, per year.

Then theres me, 8048 photos over 4 years brings my average to 2012 photos per year, a tad higher than the average 124 per year everyone else is taking. But with over 8000 photos brings problems and that is how to easily store and manage photos in a way which makes them easy to locate and categorise. The main hurdles which I’ve been facing are exactly how to categorise over 8000 photos, is it best by name, by location, by date which I can always adhere too, and something which will be future proof.

On the right is my current folderisation method which I sorted out only a couple weeks ago; sorting photos by main location first, and then by date, however this poses a few problems in itself, such as if I wanted to find a certain photo from a certain place, I have to try and remember the date, or atleast the rough date that it happened. My America folder is slightly different, categorising photos just by place rather than date, which too works well to some extent, but as always has its problems, and would be difficult to implement on a full scale basis as I would have to merge photos from different times, sometimes years apart into the same folder, and that would become messy, and something I wouldn’t like to have.

There is always of course 3rd party applications, such as Adobe Lightroom which tries to help with photo management by using folders and tags and such, but its not future proof, and Lightroom won’t be around forever, so knowing my luck I will tag and categorise all my photos for Lightroom, get use to it and then have it replaced or become defunct. For now though atleast I’ll continue on with my current system until I get frustrated with it more and try to change it again, but with an ever growing photo collection, the future doesn’t look like it’s going to be easy!

For the second time in my Acer Travelmate 8104′s 18month life, it decided to break at the most inconvienient time once I had arrived back in Kingston from the Easter break. This time the laptop simply failed to turn on at all ever, and after being taken to a repair company to confirm my worst suspicions, the motherboard was at fault and would need to be replaced, which would have then been the laptop’s 3rd motherboard. However, as Myles’ Acer laptop also broke a few months ago with similar problems, a replacement motherboard was priced at £800 by Acer + £300 labour.

So, with the laptop being far too much to be worthy of a repair, I went on the hunt for a new laptop, and as Myles blogged at the time, the number of decent laptops in the high street are few and far between, especially if you want Vista. So, we looked online, and after a while debating I decided on a customised Dell Inspiration 6400. But, thats where the second wave of issues arose, which was after ordering the laptop, I recieved a phone call from Dell telling me that they won’t deliver the laptop to Kingston as my debit card was registered in Torquay, to help prevent fraud. So with not many other options, I went to my bank to change my address, and then re-order a new laptop the next day.

So, for the next nine days I waited for my new laptop to arrive, using Myles’ laptop to check my emails hourly it would seem, and try to sort out Dell to make them not charge me for the original order which they had reserved the money out of my account for. But today, all was resolved, and my laptop arrived at the door! So now I’m back online and able to do work again alot more easily, and at a much faster speed since my new Dell laptop has alot higher specs than my old 18 month old laptop now has.

If you’re like me and have a laptop (like my lovely Acer Travelmate 8104) which seems to like to melt itself internally when using graphic intensive software like Notepad (or the most awesomest new game Supreme Commander), then here are my six fool proof steps to getting you back on the road again!

 Step One – Move to a desk! There is no use actually trying to use your laptop as a LAPtop – it just isn’t going to work… well… unless you either want your laptop to melt itself to your legs… or your legs to actually melt off.

 Step Two – Still not working? We need to get some air under that thing… go into the kitchen and get the metal grate thing which is in the cooking tray… Plonk your laptop on top of that and hey presto – instant air!

Step Three – If you’re like me with your desk right next to your window – open your window! – Added air flow with help prevent you from those unexpected shut downs…

Step Four – We need to take some drastic action; go get your vacuum cleaner, and use the nozzle pipe to hoover your laptop – yes – hoover your fans and such and get rid of all that dust and dirt in your fan vents!

Step Five – Alright, this clearly isn’t working… pop down to a computer store and buy a notebook cooler to go under your laptop…

Step Six – What? You CLOSED the window!?!?! You fool – open it back up again! We may now have a fan system… but extra wind power is always a helpful bonus

Now you are set! You should now be able to play Supreme Commander or write in Notepad at your heart’s content!