The old faithful cube PC, my pride and joy for many a year, had a long lingering death…although it nearly got thrown threw the window on several occassions. It has been overthrown by a shiny new destop, up to date model with intels latest chip, Core i7, a whopping 6GB Ram and a huge hard drive (twice the size of the external one now) so plenty of room for all those pictures. OK there are higher spec machines out there but its by far and away a big step up from its predecessor. The cube didn’t give up lightly though, the new Dell machine, a Studio XPS 8100 for some reason wasn’t compatible with my monitor, so had to get a new widescreen 20 inch LCD and I must admit the pictures look so much better on it. Then after a day or so the internet connection was dropping every time the pc was re-booted and had to repair a network driver. The Dell support was great though and the other night they took remote control of the pc and tried loads of fixes – its really weird seeing the cursor on screen move when you haven’t touched anything! Took longer than supposed to bu really shouldn’t complaian at service recieved and so far so good and internet connection has stayed on with no further problems.
Loving windows 7 too, what with the pc spec everything is running so much faster. No more lock ups and window freezes when trying to run two applications simultaneously. Pictures import and render so much quicker in Lightroom now, its a joy to processs the Raw files in this now and really sppeeds up workflow. This weekend I will be enjoying a Stu Little live screencast, as he dmonstrates tips and techniques with the latest version of Lightroom 3 – one of the topics will be on Noise Reduction. Stu is a great photographer and Photoshop educator, so why not joing him this Sunday 20th June at 6pm BST. He will laso be availble on Twitter for a question and answer session. Its going to be so much better watching this on the new large monitor and pc – it will be much more entertaining than the England game was tonight !
Dell Studio XPS 8100
