*How* frustrating?????

My new camera did indeed arrive yesterday afternoon, although not with the postman. I'd had my headphones on, transcribing stuff for a client, so when he couldn't get an answer, he left it with my next door neighbour who kindly popped over as soon as he saw me put the lights on for Mick's arrival home.

It's lovely :o) In fact, it's lovelier than lovely. It was bought in Japan, but the seller has kindly printed me an English manual and thrown in a converter for the charger and two spare batteries.

So why isn't this post full of sparkly new pictures then? Well, firstly it's rained here all day. Secondly I have a lurgy and I'm not up to doing mammoth walks to get to really inspiring scenery. Thirdly I've just tested it out by taking some pictures of the various seashells scattered round the house and its RAW format can't be read by my version of Photoshop Elements. The most frustrating thing is that the Canon 50D was added into Adobe's RAW files at version 4.6 and Elements 5.0 is only compatible up to 4.3.

Can we say AAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH?????

So my options are:
1) Buy Elements 7.0 - the cheapest software option at about £80, but neither my PC nor my laptop have the processor power required to run it so I'd need a new one.
2) Buy Lightroom 2.0 - medium priced software option at about £228, PC will require a memory upgrade.
3) Buy CS4 - hugely expensive software option at £558, but this PC could just about run it (though it would be extremely slow).

I don't think I can even run the new version of Canon's own RAW conversion software which comes with it - I'll try it in a bit, but unless they've improved it dramatically, it's a very clunky tool.

Currently running with the 'soddit it's only money' option, which is a new laptop and Lightroom 2.0....