Computer Upgrade: So I finally bit the bullet and ordered this bad boy. I kind of wanted to throw up at the price but when I tried to upgrade Lightroom to the newest version it would...

maggiemae Loc: North Carolina

So I finally bit the bullet and ordered this bad boy. I kind of wanted to throw up at the price but when I tried to upgrade Lightroom to the newest version it would not even open on my current computer. I have been wanting an upgrade for awhile now. The one I am currently using barely can run Lightroom and forget about photoshop. Half the time Lightroom lags and freezes when trying to do edits. The one I have now has 8g ram. The new one will have 64g. I also bought a HUION pen tablet to go with it to make editing easier. This is the first step to upgrading my photography gear. Eventually, I want a new camera but I will have to get this paid off first. I am so excited for this to arrive!

UTMike Loc: South Jordan, UT

I look forward to what you produce.

maggiemae Loc: North Carolina

UTMike wrote:

I look forward to what you produce.

The worst part about ordering new gear is waiting for it to arrive! Hopefully this will make editing much easier and hopefully must faster. It takes me hours to edit just a few photos on my current computer.

PAR4DCR Loc: A Sunny Place

Good for you Maggie!

Don

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

maggiemae wrote:

The worst part about ordering new gear is waiting for it to arrive! Hopefully this will make editing much easier and hopefully must faster. It takes me hours to edit just a few photos on my current computer.

Almost all modern software and operating systems are designed to take advantage of the speeds of SSD storage devices. If your old machine has a 5500 or 7200 RPM hard drive, that's why it's a tired old dog...

Most Intel processors are crippled by I/O for 99% of tasks if the OS or data is on a spinning platter. Switching to an SSD makes a huge difference.

maggiemae Loc: North Carolina

burkphoto wrote:

Almost all modern software and operating systems are designed to take advantage of the speeds of SSD storage devices. If your old machine has a 5500 or 7200 RPM hard drive, that's why it's a tired old dog...

Most Intel processors are crippled by I/O for 99% of tasks if the OS or data is on a spinning platter. Switching to an SSD makes a huge difference.

I am not sure what it has in it but I think it is not SSD. It is a cheap $500 Walmart HP that is at least 5 years old. It has Windows 10 on it but it won't fully update any 10 updates since I got it. When the new version of LrC wouldn't open after I downloaded it, that was the last straw. I had to redownload the older version and lost all my settings. I was so annoyed.

krashdragon

Remember when a 1 meg hard drive was a big deal? And the prices were double and triple then for almost any computer stuff...

burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC

maggiemae wrote:

I am not sure what it has in it but I think it is not SSD. It is a cheap $500 Walmart HP that is at least 5 years old. It has Windows 10 on it but it won't fully update any 10 updates since I got it. When the new version of LrC wouldn't open after I downloaded it, that was the last straw. I had to redownload the older version and lost all my settings. I was so annoyed.

I feel your pain. We had a cheap ACER PC around here that my twins tried to use for school. It wouldn't do squat. Win 10 brought it to a crawl, just running a browser and Word. I bought a 2013 iMac for the family in 2014, and it was an instant improvement. It still works fine with LrC and Ps, but only because I cut it open and swapped the spinning platter boot drive for an SSD, and doubled RAM while in there. (That was a pain, but it worked.)

I just bought an M1 MacBook Air in August. It replaced the 2013 iMac that can't be upgraded to the last two Mac operating systems. I'll be putting Win10 on the iMac soon... THAT will work reasonably well for most light tasks.

The M1 Air rocks. Scrolling through 16MP raw images in Lightroom happens so fast you can barely see them, and exports are ridiculously fast. I edit 4K videos on this thing, with no glitches. It runs movies for 12+ hours.

Tonight, I converted a large TIFF image from B&W to color with Photoshop's neural filters... in under two seconds. The M1 has 16 neural engine processor cores... I guess they work!

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

maggiemae wrote:

So I finally bit the bullet and ordered this bad b... (show quote)

You will probably need more storage - 1 TB is barely enough to do the OS and the usual junk that accumulates on the C: drive. Invest in a datacenter/enterprise drive - like an 8 TB Western Digital Gold or Ultrastar (formerly Hitachi) - will cost you about $200 and it will have a 5 year warranty. Purchase a Vantek USB C 3.1 Gen2 enclosure for around $30 and you'll have a solution that is considerably more reliable (and faster) than the cheap, high capacity drives that you can buy as preconfigured external drives. I think you can buy one of those cheap 12 TB drives for a little over $100, but I wouldn't be able to sleep at night knowing the drive can fail at any point in time.

jdubu Loc: San Jose, CA

Congratulations on your upgrade! It only hurts a little while, but the dividend is it will be super fast and save you time in the long run.

We bit the bullet and upgraded my wife's desktop PC earlier this year and the gains in time saved is well worth it. Then I replaced our aging laptop so we could efficiently run Autocad on it in the field with clients and it has already paid for itself. Last week, I ordered a replacement upgrade PC for me as I have a couple of photo jobs that my 9 yr old desktop is having trouble handling without freezing up with the newest PSCC. Luckily, I can use the laptop until it arrives.

I agree with Gene51 that you will probably need more storage space than the 1TB. External and backup drives are easy to assemble and you'll know what the reliability is. Once you set up your new laptop, you'll be glad you made the choice. So much faster editing than what you described.

Bugs

I ordered this same computer almost a year ago and it struggles with LR and PS, blue screen of death often. Problem is memory, apparently, not 32 that it has, but the limiting 2GB of the NVIDIA GeoForce MX 350 Video Card. That can't be changed. Wonderful computer for everything else. I run PS and LR every day because I take and process bird and landscape pictures every day. I will see the death screen two or three times per week. It upgraded fine to Win 11. The modifier of this computer sent me 2 - 16 GB replacement memory cards which I installed without difficulty, about 9 months ago, helped a bit, bit didn't address the real problem. When I ordered through Amazon, I missed the fine print that modification was by a third party and wasn't covered by Dell warranty.

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

maggiemae wrote:

The worst part about ordering new gear is waiting for it to arrive!
…

The second worst part is trying to get all your stuff transferred and getting the UI to look like what you’re used to.

Morning Star Loc: West coast, North of the 49th N.

krashdragon wrote:

Remember when a 1 meg hard drive was a big deal? And the prices were double and triple then for almost any computer stuff...

I don't remember a 1mb hard drive. The first computer I ever used had a huge 30mb hard drive.
Windows version? What Windows.... I had to learn DOS.
"Fortunately" I had four sons who were more than willing to teach Mom what to do and how to do it... would have been nice if all four had given me the same instructions to achieve the same result.
After a few weeks of that, I waited till they were at school or doing their homework in their room, pulled out the handbook and figured out for myself what to do and how.
Guess what... after a number of months the boys came to me to ask questions about the computer, especially after Win3.1 was installed on that computer.
We're now this many years later and the boys will still occasionally ask me, "Mom, how......
I'll tell them I don't know their computer, get their manual out or search for it on-line.
Yes, I know, I'm a mean Mom!

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

Morning Star wrote:

I don't remember a 1mb hard drive. The first compu... (show quote)

My meat memory is aging but I think my first hard drive was 10Mb.

maggiemae Loc: North Carolina

Thank you everybody for the suggestions. I know I need to invest in an external hard drive but am tapped out for now. Transferring my photos isn't hard because I everything is saved to "cloud" type storage. All I have to do is log in and evrything is there. So convenient and I can access my stuff on any device. I'll let you know how I like it once I get to play on it some.