Drive Reaches The End Of The Road

My other half's PC started acting strangely recently with different programs either crashing or hanging. Removing and re-installing them didn't help, and then I noticed lots of disk errors in the event log. Not a good sign! So a quick backup later I swapped the drive and restored Windows onto the replacement - result PC working and I'm a hero :)

Here's the dying drive. Well, having taken it apart, it's really dead now. I thought I'd take the opportunity to use "image stacking" to get the whole thing in focus. Basically, you take a lot of photos with the focus varying from the front of the object to the back, then load them into a special program (I used CombineZM) to merge all the in-focus bits together. I took 57 photos for this because I wanted everything in focus, but with some images you wouldn't need so many.

The result wasn't perfect, and required some touching up to remove artefacts. Also the drive had collected quite a bit of dust which needed removing, so it took a while to edit afterwards.

If you want to have a go at stacking there's a useful article here.