PC's to avoid

mbird · April 1, 2009

Hi All

A while ago I made a post about problems with corruption of RAW files when they were being imported into Lightroom. The pictures would seem to import okay to start with, and then as Lightroom went through and rendered the previews correctly, a percentage of the pictures would get corrupted by various brightly coloured blocks, normally the bottom right 25% of the picture, but sometimes all of it. This meant deleting the imported picture and trying again. Sometimes the reimported photo would be okay, sometimes it would take three or four goes. I have already tried different memory cards etc, all with the same result, which was all very annoying.

One of the forum members (I think it may have been Perry?), said that a google search had revealed a lot of people having the same problem. I did a lot of reading up and there were various scenarios, but one common thread was that a large percentage of people having the issue were using Hewlett Packard PC's with AMD processors. Guess what I have? Yep, HP+AMD

Having now got my new camera today, I shot a few test piccies, and imported them into Lightroom. The problem is now much worse, as about 30% of the pictures exhibit corruption (9 out of 31 shots). When importing them again, the corruption is identical. I have tried copying the RAW files onto the PC hard drive first, but this doesn't seem to make much difference. Since the files on the new camera are so much bigger (17-20Mb per RAW image) the corruption is worse, pointing to an error in actually handling the file.

I tried something I had read about, and copied the files via a USB card reader onto my laptop (Intel Core 2 Duo processor this time), and then copying them across my wireless network to my desktop PC, then importing them into Lightroom. Guess what? No corruption at all :dance It seems the AMD chips for some reason are missing instructions that Intel chips have, which in normal life don't matter, but are essential for RAW file transfer.

The moral of this story seems to be to avoid HP computers with AMD processors. This is the first AMD machine I have owned (but not the first HP), and I have to say with the amount of problems I have had, I will not be buying either HP or AMD again. At least I have sussed a workaround, but it is a bit of a kerfuffle

mbird · April 2, 2009

Hi Jonzo,

No, I've tried both the built in reader and a third party USB multi-card reader on the HP desktop, but used the same USB reader on the Laptop. This proves it's not the reader I think . I've also just ordered a, ExpressCard CF adaptor for the laptop, so that should at least make taking the photos from the CF card to the laptop a lot faster.