Merry Christmas everyone. Nice and warm this side, went for a swim at the beach yesterday

I'm all about the end result, rather than getting hung up with numbers.
I let my K-3 float to a max of 3200, and 1600 if i want/need a particularly clean shot for any particular reason.

Less stress and more try.

Bottom line is the exposure triangle. If you really need a lower ISO then you need either a narrower depth of field/wide aperture or a long shutter speed time.
With those you risk getting parts of the image out of focus/missing focus or motion blur in the shot. A bit of noise is easier to deal with than a missed shot altogether after all.

These are genuinely excellent. Thanks for sharing.

DId you run the Recova in deep scan mode?

Make sure you don't restore anything it does find back onto the same card drive.

Benefits would depend on when you last installed your OS and software. I've found systems usually hum on a fresh install, and it's a good chance to reevalueate exactly what you have installed also. Yeah it takes a long time, but as I said Personally I prefer the fresh install, but as always that's just my opinion.

My input is pretty quick.

Windows 10 is very mature now and I've found to be very stable at work and at home. Keep all your device drivers up to date and you should be ok.

Definitely put your OS on an SSD
You can either move an existing instance across, or personally I much prefer to do a clean install.
Either way, this product is free (well was last time I checked) and extremely handy to work out what's going on.

Also much easier for night long exposures, where you can't see anything useful through the optical viewfinder

Yeah live view is showing the image from the sensor, so you're getting real time feedback on where lens is 'looking' and not handing that to the normal phase detect AF. Live view doesn't require calibration or risk forward or back focussing etc. I think if your core subject is static and especially if the camera is tripod mounted, then live view is the way to go. Even if composition is found via the optical viewfinder, I switch to live view to focus and set the shot.

Didn't know about the AF point/area ability in live view though, so will go and see if that's available on say a K-3 as well? Thanks for the heads up.

No I did not know that. Thanks for the heads up.

In live view on a tripod, I tend to switch to manual focus, and zoom in with digital zoom and focus peaking to confirm the exact spot I'm after.
View returns to full screen once you half press the shutter button again and you're all good to go.

Tools for tasks.

Just need to identify requirements and priorities, and then see what addresses those best for you.