So, I've been struggling along with a machine I built in 2001. I'd upgraded everything several times, and it had 2G of ram, etc., etc. Running XP Professional.
But I finally broke down and bought a new one. Costco had an HP p6787c-b system for sale. Windows 7 64-bit, 4-core AMD Phenom II processor at 3GHz, 8G of RAM, 1.5TB hard disk, firewire (needed by my LS8000 scanner), 8 USB ports, integrated memory card readers, and two (count 'em!) 23" 1920x1050 LED-backlit monitors with a dual-LUT Radeon 6450 graphics card. HP had a deal, and Costcto is a good place to buy computers--they require the manufacturers to support a two-year warranty and they have a liberal 90-day no-questions-asked return policy. HP's deal was a rebate that brought the price down to a grand, with the monitors. Such a deal.
The monitors suck, by the way. (As expected.) Color balance changes on them with tilt angle, but I put one next to my (nice) Dell U2410 24" display, and put the other one on my wife's computer.
AND WOW! I pulled up two halves of a 6x12 negative scan, scanned at 4000 spi in my Nikon scanner, and it only took Photomerge one minute flat to merge them. I could not find the boundary. The same version of Photoshop (CS4) had choked after two hours with 2400 spi scans on the old machine, and I'd had to stitch them manually.
The resulting file exceeded Photoshop's PSD file size limit of 2 gigs, and I had to merge some layers to get the size down low enough. The resulting image is roughly 9000x18000 pixels. That's a pretty sizeable file, even by our standards.
Vuescan provided the driver for the Nikon scanner, and other drivers were easy to get. I used Laplink's PC-Mover to move the many minor applications--worked pretty well but I still have to fix some things. I upgraded Windows to the Professional version and added the virtual machine capability, wtih an XP virtual machine and a Linux virtual machine, just for play.
All that I really wish it had was a Blu-Ray writer.
I'm blown away by the performance--for what the magazines call a mid-price productivity machine.
Rick "who replaces his computer every ten years whether it needs it or not" Denney
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