Punishment for Upgrading

I'm not sure why I thought this wouldn't happen. You rarely hear stories about how upgrading something goes smoothly and painlessly. Yet I was sure that buying a new camera would be a simple thing, especially since it's made by the same people who made my old camera.

For the last several years I have had a trusty digital camera. A nice little Canon PowerShot S 500. I would have been happy to keep on using my trusty little camera, except that it's showing signs of imminent demise. The video screen on the camera shows things in shades of purple, the zoom lever sticks, and if you look at the pictures I posted about my summer vacation you'll notice that the ones at the bottom have a pinkish stripe at the top (or right-hand edge if they're up and downers.) So we went to Best Buy to look at some of the new models, and I found one I liked. The PowerShot SD790 IS. We came home and I looked up as many reviews of it as I could, and it seems like people really like this little camera. So I clicked on over to Amazon and purchased one.

Yesterday the box came, and the first disappointment (although it was expected) was that they've changed the battery design, so none of the 3 batteries I have for Old Camera will work with New Camera. So I plugged the charger in and waited the 2 hours it takes to charge a battery. I also bought a bigger memory card than the one that came standard, so i plugged that in and went to clicking. The display was a little grainy, but it was 8:30 at night in a pretty dark house, so I wasn't too concerned. I took some pictures of Husband vacuuming up cobwebs in the basement, and they turned out very nicely. Then I decided to download the pictures to my computer.

I installed the software from the CD that came with the camera, plugged in the camera, and... nothing. The screen on the camera went blank (like it's supposed to) but nothing happened on the computer. I tried using the new cable, using the old cable, uninstalling the software and reinstalling the software, but I couldn't make the computer and camera talk to each other. I called Hubby. He spent 2 hours removing things, deleting things, taking things out of the registry, reinstalling things, and he got to the same point I did: the camera will not talk to the computer. The last thing Husband said as we quit for the night was, "You might have to let me reinstall your computer." These words cause me great fear, and it took a long time to fall asleep.

This morning I called Canon support and talked to James. He's a very nice man who spent an hour with me trying to get the camera and the computer to talk to each other. His final opinion was that there is a problem on the Microsoft side of the fence that is keeping my computer from communicating with its new friend. He said I could use plan B, which would be taking the memory card out of the camera and putting it into the computer and getting the photos that way, or I could go with Husband's plan.

So this afternoon I will try to locate all of the things on my computer that I do not want to lose forever and back them up. I will forget something, I always do when this process occurs. It will take several days for me to get things all back to the way I like them, and there will be no photos today. This is the best rendition of what I look like right now that I can come up with: