Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2012/03/15
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]I prioritize my computer upgrades in this order (always) 1/ More RAM - This is *the* most cost effective upgrade. Buy enough memory so your system never has to "swap". 2/ Faster disk - SSD is preferred over 10K drive for raw read speed. Your boot drive can usually fit into an small SSD. The speedup with a 10K driver over a 7200 RPM drive is unlikely to be that noticeable. I have vague memories of Photoshop using a swap disk, try using the SSD as the swap disk. You might see some improvements depending on how PS actually use the swap drive. SSDs are down to about $1/GB if you look around a little. No reason not to buy one for your boot drive. SSD has one main disadvantage which is the number of write cycles and slow'ish writes. The number of write cycles are now large enough that your computer will likely to be obsolete before your SSD runs into write cycle limitations for 98% of users. 3/ New CPU - usually not worth the trouble. After 2 years, you will probably need a new motherboard for a new CPU because everything else has changed. Just buy a new computer. :) For my own laptop, max'ed out the RAM at 8 GB. Can't put more in. This made a huge difference when I was running memory hungry S/W. Recently removed the optical drive and replaced it with a 128GB SSD for the boot drive. Noticeable difference but not as much as when I added the extra memory. Regards, Spencer On Mar 14, 2012, at 13:28, Mark Pope wrote: > that's exactly what I did and it wasn't that expensive. I'm lucky in that > I have a local store that really care about the systems they build. > I ended up with a core i7 cpu, 16GB RAM, a 1GB video card and 2TB HDD (I > subsequently added the 2TB drive from my old XP machine, which holds my > images). > I'm running 64-bit Windows 7 professional. > The speed of the system is limited by the main HDD, but it is quite fast. > Having read Richard's post, I am tempted to use a faster HDD, but it's not > a priority at this time.