On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 12:28 PM, John Francis <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 10:31:13AM -0400, Matthew Hunt wrote:
>>
>> From my point of view, a computer is something that needs to be
>> upgraded every few years whether I use it for photography or not.
>> Some portion of the expense can be "charged" to photography, but not
>> all of it. I guess it depends on what all you use it for.
>
> I don't think that's true any more.
> ...
> I'd consider it quite reasonable to assume that anything bought
> today, as long as it isn't a really low-end system, should be
> capable of being used for at least five years.
I don't think we're really disagreeing. Your historical and
forward-looking timescales for upgrades are not much different from my
own. I just upgraded from a Socket 939 Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (3-5+ years
old, depending on what part you're looking at) to a Core i7-930 system
(which I expect to use for 5-ish years). But I could work with raw
K10D images on the old system with just a little patience, and I don't
think that would have changed much with a new camera body, even if it
was 15 Mpix or so. My upgrade was motivated by factors unrelated to
photography; the machine could not play back HD video without dropping
(lots of) frames, couldn't play modern games well, Flash bogged down
web browsing, etc. I also wanted to upgrade to Win 7, having gotten
used to it at work, and it seemed appropriate to upgrade the hardware
at the same time.
The LR3 system requirements are pretty modest, and can be met by a
5-ish-year-old system:
* Intel® Pentium® 4 processor or equivalent
* Microsoft® Windows® XP with Service Pack 3; Windows Vista® Home
Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise (32 bit and 64 bit); or
Windows 7 (32 bit and 64 bit)
* 2GB of RAM
* 1GB of available hard-disk space
* 1,024x768 display
* CD-ROM drive
So when someone says their system isn't powerful enough for LR3, they
probably mean it's not as fast as they would like for LR3... but for
me personally, photography isn't "the one thing" that makes me hit
that wall. I don't feel like the computer is too slow for
photography, but just dandy for everything else.
Scott mentioned having an old Celeron that he feels is fast enough for
everything else, and I'm jealous of his patience. I just upgraded my
dad from a similar system. He didn't think it was too slow,
either--he just ran out of disk space, and without any SATA support in
his machine, I pushed him to a sub-$500 Core i3 system. I found
working on his old machine to be really painful, just for things like
web browsing and navigating the filesystem. I was swearing at it
pretty much constantly. I think it comes down to temperament, and how
used you are to faster computers... my dad has since said how much he
likes the new computer, and I bet if I switched him back to the old
one, he would not tolerate it like he did before.
--
PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List
[email protected]
http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow
the directions.
