Download programme

Hello and welcome to the forums Rob,

Regarding picassa, never used it and did not realize it had the feature to get images off of camera, but i do know its a photo editor.
With most computers the way to get them to play nicely with the camera is to use the EOS Uility version for your camera, I have not had luck with directly connecting many editors. Your file transfer to computer program does not need to be the same as the editor and really probably should not be ....they are not designed to connect to every camera out there and do it well.

The EOS Utility is a file management tool, it will allow wired or wireless transfer and tethered operation with the drivers it supplies to the computer. Wired transfer is slow because the camera is limited to usb2 technology form the 2000's Wireless is worse from my experience, the utility will help with consistent transfer, but speed is limited to to the tech used.
Most of us photographers have a CF card reader and copy the folders over directly to the desktop to manage the files on the computer since you can copy in just a few minutes a whole card. I would highly consider the card reader path for yourself.

For photo editing there is no perfect answer here. You can open and export your raw files with Canon Digital Professional which is a good tool for adjusting the exposure of a raw file and exporting as JPG or tiff for a final edit in another program. On the free side besides picassa things like gimp and darktable are popular.

Personally I like Lightroom, and which i still run a old retail copy on my mac which is about a decade old now, but need to just buy a subscription eventually so that it works with my 5d4 raw files without converting to dng. I dump the files from the card on the desktop, sort them into folders, import the folders into LR, and then all the edits to the raw file are saved inside the LR catalogue so I don't have to export JPGs of everything unless I need one to upload or send for printing. Plus i can move the imported folders around and mage files within the program.

 

Sounds like the issues you are having are different from what it originally seemed. You said you used Picassa to as the download and edit so i replied to the idea of it as a download program. Its ok you don't use or like mac or LR (in fact i have two much newer windows machines but rarely fire up LR on them due to my workflow preference...operating systems i have used many) I simply outlined my workflow and that i use industry standard tools and still don't use a program to move files off the card, canon recommends only transferring with their utility, but copy off of card is also safe and will not corrupt the canon formatting on the card.

Can you please try testing opening up card reader from windows explorer and creating a folder on your computer and copying the files directly? It would be very helpful to know if the issue is with picassa throttling the transfer. If a direct copy of the same data is quick we removed the issue. If it is still very very slow, my assumption would be either the CF card or the Card reader, probably the card itself. Both of these are easy to replace and verify if they are the issue. The last resort should be the computer, maybe the usb port is going bad but its not likely and you should probably have a second USB port to verify with. If the computer itself was the issue it would likely run very slow on everything.

JPG was a bit of a surprise, I assumed slowness was in part due to moving 30+ gigs of large RAW files using a application instead of direct file transfer via windows explorer. If your simply editing JPGs, no need to add DPP4 from canon as part of the situation, that is designed to do some editing and exporting of raw. I would say you should read some reviews on Canva, Pixlr, Darktable, and Gimp just to name a few and see if any of them catch your interest if your looking for a free editor.

If you never used the EOS utility the one on the CD is probably a couple patches to old and idk if it is compatible with your windows. as I think the copy on the CD would be windows 7 era. I would definitely go to the 60d page on canon and download the most recent version for your camera. You probably should update the firmware once your comfortable with using the utility, seems like that was never done, and they did release bug fixes for the cameras for a few years on each camera model.

Could you elaborate on what errors you were getting with the install / setup of the EOS utility?