[Leica] OT: Report: My New Desktop PC

[rbaron at concentric.net (Robert D. Baron)]

On January 31 of 2007 I wrote:

> My trusty Dell P4 1.7 ghz with 1 gb of ram turned 5 years old this 
> month, and like me, it is starting to have trouble keeping up with the 
> younger generation....so I would like to ask for the wisdom of the LUG 
> regarding a replacement.

<snip>

> I see three routes:
> 
> 1. A new Dell;
> 
> 2. A new local shop built; or
> 
> 3. A new Mac Pro.

<and so on>.

Many LUGers chimed in with thoughts and suggestions and I greatly 
appreciated and considered them all.  Here is the report I feel I owe; I 
picked up my new computer a week ago and have finally found the disks 
and serial numbers for most of my programs and installed them and am 
getting back to what passes for normal for me.

I settled on the local PC Club store (http://www.pcclub.com) because 
several local folks (including the other member of the OKCLUG) spoke 
well of them.  I decided against Mac because I didn't want to have to 
buy all new software and learn a whole new operating system at this 
stage of my life.  I decided on a custom built machine (as opposed to 
Dell or HP) because it seemed I could get much much more bang for my 
bucks.  PC Club will likely be around for a while - I hope - and I was 
impressed with the salesman I worked with.

For about $1600 + tax I got a custom built for me desktop with Intel 
Core 2 Duo 2.4, 2 gb of ram, an NVidia GEForce 7900G5 graphics card 
w/256mb ram, 2 sata2 hard drives (one 160gb, one 500gb) (and they also 
put the 250 gb eide drive with image files from my old desktop into the 
nifty looking new ventilated case with heavy duty power supply and fan). 
  This also included XP Pro SP 2, an optical drive and extra firewire ports.

At my request (I pretended like I knew what I was talking about) they 
created a 20gb partition on the 500gb drive that I have now told 
Photoshop to use as a scratch disk.

So far it seems blazingly fast opening programs and running Photo 
Mechanic, Lightroom and PS CS2.  Now back to taking pictures, I hope.

Thanks again to all who helped.

--Bob Baron / Oklahoma City