This might help in your decision making.

I think the design life of the shutter in this camera is 100,000 but you'll see from the link that at least one has done over 170,000.

Conclusion, 21000 is not too many in my opinion. It just shows that the camera has been used rather than sit in a bag for most of its life.

Is it perhaps time for you to look at buying a bag that has weather proofing built-in?

I have both the DA*60-250mm 1:4 and a Sigma EX DG OS 70-200mm 1:2.8. The latter was bought because I had serious problems trying to focus the 60-250 on my K5 in dim lighting of night time car races.

The Sigma was a vast improvement, then came the K-5II, and in combination with the Sigma I wasted far fewer shots to bad focusing.

I then tried the DA*60-250mm on the K-5II and whilst it was an improvement over the K5 + 60-250 combo, the Sigma is still much better.

For daylight use I'd choose the Pentax every time, but it's stretched in low light. For me, the Sigma is the one I would keep if I really had to sell one of them, but I don't, so I'm keeping both .

Louise, I think your question may be best answered by going to the site and finding out.

I understand that Carl, no offence taken, I was primarily drawing peoples attention to the ESC's site by using the link to a Pentax related recall.

FYI: I was guided to that site by this news headline. I find it astonishing that people will apparently put their lives at risk by not returning products known to be potentially dangerous.

Yes, I realised it was an old advisory, but I thought it worth mentioning again as it was related to Pentax. Others might find the rest of the Electrical Safety Council's site interesting though, which of course is not directly related to Pentax, as per the rules of this forum.

I discovered this today. Please check your UK 3 pin power cables and if affected, take the advised steps to acquire a replacement from Pentax UK Ltd.

For you David, I will take some. I've not used it much over the winter as I prefer to take my macro shots 'in the wild' as it were, rather than stage them indoors.

I did use it last summer but I'm not sure that I can identify which images were shot with it.

BTW: Ordinarily I would use the tripod mount on the bellows where possible for fine focus adjustment. I assembled the rig to take the above image (and others) of it for Charlotte.

I use either a Pentax AF160FC ring flash for convenience, or this . . .


K51_6211.jpg by Peter E Smith (AKA Mannesty), on Flickr" class="comment_image" />


The Manfrotto Hydrostatic arm will even extend the flash far enough to light a macro subject when I fit my 180mm macro lens to the bellows.

Can I suggest that you visit somewhere like PC World, tell them what you want the machine for and hopefully they can advise you which of their range might be suitable.

To answer the question in your topic title, Windows 7 is very good, millions of desktop PC's & laptops around the world are using it, but I think you've asked the wrong question. What you really need to know is what hardware you need to run Windows 7 or 8 for your specific requirements.

My suggestion, fastest 64 bit CPU you can afford, as much RAM as you need (8Gb minimum), modern graphics card that is supported by modern CPU intensive software that can take advantage of the processing capability of the graphics card, 2 x 2Tb RAID mirrored HDD backed up to external 2Tb USB3 drive (preferably 2 or more), built-in card reader, Gigabit Ethernet, USB3 ports, DVD writer.