Community Newsletter: Q&A: New PC recommendations needed for graphic-intensive programs

Photoshop advice

After reading your question and a few of the other replies, my reply went off a little sideways. Following those Adobe links may enhance PS performance on your XP box to the point where you don't need to add hardware. Or if you could make a few relatively low-cost upgrades, say a second hard drive, for better performance.

The older laptop that I have with XP, single core and hard drive and 1 Mb RAM runs almost PS almost as well as my new dual-core Vista box with 3GB RAM and dual hard drives. In short, just about any new mid-level XP box with a gig or two of RAM will run PS pretty well if it's configured properly unless you using huge image files from high end cameras. I'm guessing that an $800 to $1000 XP desktop would make you very happy.

If you don't mind hitting that $1500 mark, I'd recommend going to an electronic retailer, get an HP DV97xx laptop and inexpensive external flat panel monitor for home. As a photographer, you'll appreciate the mobility that a laptop allows. I recommend the external monitor too because it allows you to move the PS tools out of the workspace to the external monitor, which is really nice when editing. If you really want to splurge, get one of the larger flat screens that flips so that you can edit portrait pictures on an appropriately oriented screens.

On the XP v. Vista issue, 1-2 GB RAM on XP or 2-3 on Vista is adequate for general PS operations at least for me. I was skeptical about Vista but it's kinda hard to avoid on non-customized configs. Nonetheless, I've found PS is works fine on either. Just a note, if you end up with Vista, the 'Home' version will see at most 3GB of ram - you can learn more about that from MS. That was another reason that I was skeptical about Vista. I've found that for what I'm doing, PS runs fine on XP and Vista. Furthermore, with the stated resources on either box, I can multi-task with a browser, mp3 tunes, etc. without having system melt downs.

Anyhow, hope this helps and good luck again.