burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

The Fusion Drive was TWO drives — a large conventional HDD and a smaller SSD. Through clever virtualization, they were formatted to appear as one drive. The SSD was for the OS and apps, and the HDD was for data.

Personally, I’d rather just have a pair of separate drives... easier to manage, much like a C:\ and D:\ in Windows.

In 2019, my 1TB HDD was nearly full. So, I put a 2TB SSD and 16GB RAM in my old iMac. (OWC sells a kit to enable brave DIYers to do that.) it made a HUGE difference. I/O is always the biggest bottleneck in most workflows, so removing the HDD and installing an SSD made enormous sense.

Today, I’d just buy an M1 Mac Mini and be happy as a kid in a toy store. More $$$, but worth it.

DirtFarmer Loc: Escaped from the NYC area, back to MA

Never say never.

I have a desktop computer from about 2015. It ran Win7 until about a year and a half ago. It was starting to show problems, but it was still working and useful. I could have continued with Win7 but I decided to finally get with the times. I upgraded my Win7 to Win10. The upgrade went smoothly and I was up and running in a few hours. There were a few things that I had to learn anew but they were minor things and presented no problems.


There is something to be said for that approach but not everyone wants to buy a new computer just because a new OS is needed (or wanted).


I did it and had no problem. I am comfortable with the OS and none of my tools were made obsolete that I recall. Even my Delphi 5 compiler from the mid '90s works (they changed the Windows help system format so the help files no longer work but that happened in Win7). Win10 works for me. I am considering updating my desktop for reasons wholly unrelated to the OS. I've been using computers since around 1959-60 and have had to deal with a lot of OS changes.

therwol Loc: USA

Something is definitely not right. I have 14 year old Dell D530 laptop that I've kept running from XP to Windows 10. It only has 4 gig RAM, the maximum it will take. It isn't a fast computer by today's standards, but I jazzed it up by putting a 1 Tb Samsung SSD in it and installed Win 7 and Win 10 (clean installs) on two partitions. I have very little software installed. I use it intermittently for video capture through firewire. Nothing fancy.

Having both operating systems and essentially the same software installed on two partitions on the same hardware allowed me to perform a boot speed test on each OS using the free Boot Racer. See images attached. The results of a full boot, including starting services and startup programs came up around twice as long in Windows 10, but still under a minute. If you want to live with the way your computer is set up, see if you can put in an SSD. The machine will boot much faster. You can try a clean install of Windows as well. You may have to download some drivers from the manufacturer, but I found that even on my old machine, Windows provided drivers for just about everything. One of the pains of a clean install is having to reinstall all of your programs.

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jdmiles Loc: Texas

OMG. 14 years on same laptop is enough. Upgrade and enjoy photography.

therwol Loc: USA

I have three other machines. Try to find an "out of the box" machine these days with a firewire port. You need one of those to transfer digital video tapes to files. No alternative. I had a bunch of them. My son had a bunch of them. When I went to rip the video from many DVDs I recorded on a Go Video recorder (to get rid of the DVDs), I found that I could not do that in Windows 10. It had something to do with the way those discs were finalized. Windows 7 to the rescue. That old machine has saved me many times. I may be done with it now, but I think it will sit in the closet for a bit longer "just in case."

jdmiles Loc: Texas

I just searched and I found something called FireWire to thunderbolt adapter. There are also PCI cards for FireWire. Good luck.