Hi,

This is meant to be an instructional post.

As couple of month ago, after quite a while processing images in Pixinsight manually, i.e stacking darks, stacking dark for flats and and calibrating flats, etc... 

I took the plunge and started using the Weighted Batch Pre-Processing script in Pixinsight. WBPP has a learning curve, but after doing it a couple of times, you get the hang of it. Great script, I really enjoy it.

Therefore, something that would take me 6 hours before to do manually was now down to 30 minutes to an hour. Great, I thought. I can dive into my archive and re-process some of my old stuff.

Here is what I did wrong in using the process however:
1) I got excited and starting re-processing my archive of files dating back to 2016. Did lots of them.
2) I did not have the right computer for the task.
3) I did several runs one after another - that was great. I had all kinds of data to play with and produce new images, and none of this tedious pre-processing.

Then disaster struck. 
In retrospect, a tell-tale sign would have been the computer shutting down on my in the middle of a batch....Hint - it was overheating !

As a matter of fact, it overheated quite a bit and worse - continuously.

I was batch processing on a physical hard drive HDD, archiving on a second hard drive. Both these drives failed, including my archive, which was then lost... As far as my processing hard drive, it was completely seized...Could not retrieve anything from it. Computer could no longer access it. The repair shop told me it was toast.

I also damaged the motherboard on my computer from the overheating. Two of the SATA ports are damaged  - you guessed it - the ones connected to my HDD.

Therefore, I was sadly left with no choice but to get myself a new computer. I also had lost my archive of images in the process.

After reading the recommended requirements for Pixinsight, I believe I came as close as I can to the "ideal" computer to do the job:

New I9-14900 processor. with 24 cores. (My old one had 8 cores)
128 GB RAM.
8TB storage (only) hard drive.
2TB SSD for system
2TB SSD for processing only.

Now, with processing off a solid state drive (SSD), there is a lesser chance of overdoing it. It is faster too, as a side benefit.
Since then, I have been running WBPP very gingerly and keeping a close eye on my processor temperature. So far, so good.

Again, this is my fault really, for not being familiar with the minimum requirements and also being excited and using the process to excess.

Hopefully, this can help others.

PS, I got most most of my archive back, from different stashes I had around my place....
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