Emerald Bay Photo News and Updates

For almost 5 years I was utterly faithful.

To my trusty Compaq Presario 7000, that is. It rewarded me with rock-solid performance, few hiccups, and a comforting hum every time I would boot it up.

But it finally came time to add another horse to the stable. Not being able to shake the suspicion that the Compaq would just lay down and die if it ever found out that I was even *thinking* of replacing it, I reached deep into my pocket and bought it a "companion" instead. Sort of the Ferrari to park next to the VW Bus to keep it company in the garage.

The culprit? Photoshop CS2. It flat out refused to run on my lame 512mb of RAM (oops - was that out loud? Those 512mb of RAM are not *lame*. Did I say lame? I meant ... moderately insufficient...).

And at the same time - whenever I was desperate enough to start it up - CS2 would give me hints and peeks at its awesome power that CS1 just couldn't deliver. The fact that I am flirting with the thought of making the leap to the 12+ megapixel Canon 5D made a computer upgrade an even more pressing issue.

So I consulted Digital Photo Pro magazine, and after some brain-storming sessions with my friend Jake, settled on a system he would build for me with the following gear:

- Chip: AMD Athlon 64 1GHz HT Dual Core Processor
- 4 gigs of RAM
- 3 Harddrives - one 74 gig, 10,000rpm drive to host the operating system and daily operations, plus two 400 gig, 7200prm drives in a RAID 1 array (meaning that they'll mirror eachother and I'll always have a backup of all the RAW and processed images that live there).
- 2 DVD burners
- ASUS A8N-VM Motherboard
- POWERCOLOR Radeon X800GT Video Card
- Windows XP Pro with Service Pack 2

Since this new machine (Codename: The Beast) is now dedicated pretty much exclusively to image processing, I've networked it to my Compaq (Codename: Beauty) via a Linksys Broadband router, giving The Beast access to all the files on Beauty (and vice versa), plus the internet and all other shared devices like printers, scanners, fax etc. A KVM switch from Zonet let's me share the same monitor, keyboard and mouse between both boxes.

And how has it all worked out so far?

I would have never thought working in Photoshop could be such a boundless pleasure. For the first time, it executes commands, actions and file modifications without the hint of a delay - if I blink, I'll miss it for sure. (And that despite the fact that for some reason, only 2 gig of the 4 gig of RAM are actually operational - the next BIOS update by the motherboard manufacturer or Windows Vista will hopefully fix that though).

A recent project that took up 1.5 gigs on my CF cards was processed in roughly a quarter of the usual time - RAW conversion is now not a time issue anymore, so there really is no excuse not to always shoot RAW.

All in all - it feels like working at the computer the way it should have been (was?) intended: at the speed of thought.

And yes - it was worth every penny.