I usually get my Hakan madras hot.

A4E you might be surprised to find your slides are higher resolution than you might think. Most recommendations are to scan at 4000 dpi if planning to create large prints/want the most detail or 2000dpi for smaller prints and viewing on screen

CW - good shout - mine's a pint of Hakan Mild !!

OTD possibly Hakan Mild?

Thanks OI - most of the slides are in pretty good nick, although obviously the quality of the images isn’t exactly 4k UHD standard… 😬

As an aside there are numerous devices available for reading 3.5 inch floppy disks though with the much older 5.25 inch ones it is getting harder to find readers.

How clean are your old slides a4e? I started digitising but quickly discovered there was too much muck on them (though they were kept in slide boxes or carousels) and it took a long time to clean each one up, maybe AI will solve that problem. I'm sure it will be possible to connect USB devices for a long time to come, even if it is via adapters to some new standard. How long will an external drive work is another question and as I said to Pete, check from time to time that your back-up is in a good state, nothing much worse than needing to restore and finding the back-up is corrupted.

Pete - question from someone who doesn’t really properly understand how computers work or how data is stored…. Can you foresee a time where it isn’t possible to store (for example) all your music on an actual device other than in a “cloud”, or do you think there will always be a way to keep them on, say, an external hard drive…? I’ve got the majority of my older photos on a separate hard drive, but I sometimes think that at some point it might be impossible to connect it to anything where I can view them. I also have thousands of slide transparencies from 45 years ago when I travelled across the US, Australia, and South East Asia - is it even worth digitising them, and if so, what’s the best way of storing the images for future viewing?

Good knowledge Russ.

Dan Agyei would have been for Burnley. Came on in the 88th minute of a game against Liverpool.

The Japanese team (NICT and Sumitomo Electric) achieved an internet speed of 1.02 Pbit/s, fast enough to download all of Wikipedia in one second.

Yep, all backed up.

Sure about that one Bert?

Well I hope you are thorough about back ups with all that music pete.

OI - All my own music is on this pc. I understand how to do stuff, so am loathed to change (again). Too old to be bothered with learning another load of new stuff. I still convert prices to £sd in my head. Can't press a button and quickly delete all that old shite we were taught. It's there for keeps, clogging up the works, along with all the new stuff we have to come to terms with. If I can get away with keeping W10, I will. Thanks for your input.

But you can pay for extended support

Dan Agyei for Stoke also!

I use Windows Classic to make my desktop look like Windows 7 ... my favourite

Bert - cheers 👍

pete - for a while Windows 10 makes a good target, supposedly not supported but still used by many firms and individuals. Microsoft looks bad if there is a major security breach even if they've claimed they stop supporting it so they have a vested interest in it being protected even whilst they nag you to buy a new PC. By now only a few old farts like me (and probably the NHS) use 7 so it isn't really a worthwhile target for hackers.

Thank you Bert and CW!

Standard support for Windows 10 stopped on 14th October 2025.

Michael Golding Leicester, found one sub appearance May 2025

Ah, your last, very helpful, thanks.

OI - Yes, agree about XP. I have W10 atm, but am being bugged each start-up to upgrade to W11. My lad, who is far more pc savvy than me, says to stay with W10, but today's note said updates for W10 cease from today. I've also noticed my pc getting more and more sluggish. Crossed my mind updating to W11 might be the right move. My lad's pc knowledge is about 20yrs out of date, hence my original question.