[sherrvonne]

I’ve been sidelined for a couple years due to health issues, surgery, chemo, radiation, Covid, and deaths in the family.
I’m finally able to pick up the camera again but my previous PC is maxed out. Not sure if I could improve the ram on it or should I replace it with a new PC and use the older one for office work. Can use any advice please.

[pschlute]

I’ve been sidelined for a couple years due to health issues, surgery, chemo, radiation, Covid, and deaths in the family.
I’m finally able to pick up the camera again but my previous PC is maxed out. Not sure if I could improve the ram on it or should I replace it with a new PC and use the older one for office work. Can use any advice please.

A lot will depend on what editing programs you intend to run on it. If you want to use LR, Photoshop or other intensive raw editors, make sure you get a good processor and at least 16 GB ram.

Get a system with a SSD and install your editing programs on that. It makes a big difference.

Old fashioned hard disc is perfect for storing your image files on

[sherrvonne]

That’s what I thought. I have Lightroom, Photoshop, Topaz, and several card programs that I use, plus WD’s etc.

[texandrews]

That’s what I thought. I have Lightroom, Photoshop, Topaz, and several card programs that I use, plus WD’s etc.

I highly recommend Microcenter's house brand PC's. Very good prices, but the best part is that they use off-the-shelf components. This means that as you have new needs or they age, you can pop in new components much more easily (the only caveat is the case size, and maybe the motherboard's slot layouts----some of these are so narrow that a new component like a new graphics board can cover up the adjacent slot, so you can't use that one to plug something else into.

If you are not tech-y, Microcenter's repair department will do the work for you. In terms of storage, SSD drives have come way down in price and gone up in reliability, and they are faster---which is an asset for LR and PS. Extra RAM never hurts, and some of PS and even LR's new capabilities can be RAM hungry.

Your old unit can indeed be repurposed for office work, and that could mean your photo computer could be offline as much as possible, only online for program updates and uploading to the cloud. It's an additional bit of security.

One more thing: Scott Kelby's advice for LR is to have all of your images on external drives---very easy to track stuff, very easy to back it up. Don't store much on your computer at all. With good connections and fast drives, there's no performance lag.


So sorry about your recent personal very rough patch.

[Wheatfield]

I’ve been sidelined for a couple years due to health issues, surgery, chemo, radiation, Covid, and deaths in the family.
I’m finally able to pick up the camera again but my previous PC is maxed out. Not sure if I could improve the ram on it or should I replace it with a new PC and use the older one for office work. Can use any advice please.

I don't know about OTS stuff, I have my computers built for me. My strategy has always been go to the tier just before the huge price jump to absolute top end for processors.
My next machine, which I'm just in the initial planning stages of will forgo traditional spin or SSD drives drives for PCIe drives. I'm looking at a motherboard that will mount 3 of them.
Also, lots of RAM. Buy as much as you can, even if you don't think you will need it. More RAM never hurts. The less your computer has to go to swap, the less of your life you will lose waiting for your machine to do stuff.

[marcusBMG]

My PC copes fine (for me) with RAW processing of images from a K3-ii in lightroom. Its a ~ 8 yr old intel i7 2600 lenovo thinkcentre with 16GB RAM and 440GB solid state c-drive, 1TB storage drive, cost me around $150 equiv. IMO you don't really need anything more for photos, but if you are doing more batch processing of lots of images, vidoe stuff etc then you are likely to benefit from a more recent processor and spec.

[Mooncatt]

Basic photo editing doesn't really require a ton of horsepower, so really anything will suffice if you are buying new. The only caveat I would throw in would be to get a graphics card since some of your programs can utilize it for processing. Again, it doesn't have to be blazing fast, but most anything will do fine.

For example, I have a pc with an i5-8400 processor and a GTX 1060 3 GB version graphics card. Both pretty old and the GPU is especially outdated. When exporting from Topaz DeNoise, processing on my CPU takes about 2 minutes on a 24 MP image. If I allow it to use my GPU, it takes 20 seconds or less, plus the previews update much faster. My system was $500 used, plus I upgraded to an M.2 drive and 16 GB of RAM. 32+ GB of RAM can help if you start working with a lot of layers, but that's getting into some advanced editing. I did a 26 shot composite, all 24MP, and layered them up in GIMP, and my 16 GB still handled it ok.

[krazny]

I’ve been sidelined for a couple years due to health issues, surgery, chemo, radiation, Covid, and deaths in the family.
I’m finally able to pick up the camera again but my previous PC is maxed out. Not sure if I could improve the ram on it or should I replace it with a new PC and use the older one for office work. Can use any advice please.

What are the specifications of your current computer ?

[Wingincamera]

I only know basic computer stuff but do run photography programs so in the past I have always purchased gaming laptops. My last two were Asus ROG and my wife likes Dell Alienware machines. I am not a gamer, so for photography, these are overkill. A few weeks ago a cup of hot coffee spilling across the keyboard killed my Asus Rog, all I was able to salvage was the memory chips & both internal drives. I have decided to replace it with an Asus Vivobook Pro16. I replaced the original drive with a 2TB M.2 NVM PCIe 3.0 SSD from Crucial memory. I have always used external drives for backup & photos storage, so no data was lost, and re-image the new drive I was up and running.
The Asus Vivobook seems to be working out just fine. The keyboard has a different feel, but I am getting used to it. The internal memory chips are soldered into the motherboard, but it comes with 32 GBs. It is much lighter than the prior ROG G752, which is nice.

I am sure you will find one to fit your needs. The prior post about Microcenter's computers seems like a good choice, I had never heard of them so didn't look into them. Microcenter seems like it might be a tabletop matching which is easy to open up to replace parts.

[C_Jones]

I use Google Picasa and Google Nik Collection for my editing purposes, sometimes Microsoft Paint. My editing is sort of plain and simple since I usually shoot what I want in camera for the most part, not requiring much editing.

For storage of my image files I use Western Digital "My Book" external hard drives. The prices on the amount of storage that is available now are reasonable. I can move my files to and from my computer whenever I need to, or look at them on the external drive itself.

Otherwise if you are interested in a new computer with the features to handle softwares and have more storage itself, I myself talked to a Dell computer customer service agent and she asked me what I was going to use my new computer for and I told her what I wanted to do, and she had a Dell desktop computer created for what I needed to do and I bought it. In other words she listened to what I wanted and had it built to specifications that would handle my activities.

As I said before though, if it is storage that you need, external hard drives are very useful.

[Bob 256]

Relative to "storage", as C_Jones mentioned, external hard drives are a good choice for managing your photo files. This frees up memory in your computer for other uses and all your photos are in one place (unless you have more than one external drive).

Hard drives and flash drives aren't the best solution for looooooong term storage as they can fail over time. For archival purposes, one of the best solutions right now is the M disc which is available in two forms. The first is a DVD which uses a proprietary disc media which has archival ratings. The second is Blu-Ray media (larger capacity than DVD) which has been certified by M disc. The later isn't truly archival but has long term durability. M discs require M capable writing decks but can be read by any DVD/BD deck.

With any type of storage, it's best to make more than one copy and keep those copies in different places. Cool storage conditions are better. However, for utility storage and working with your photo files, the standard hard drive is hard to beat (SSD is faster but has higher cost and some aging issues related to how many times a write operation is performed).

You might consider a laptop for your next computer. Many are quite capable nowadays and will run most photo and video software. I personally like a desktop, however, for added comfort and the bells and whistles they offer when doing this type of work, but I use my laptop because it is easy to take with you and do operations in the field.

[Mooncatt]

The problem with Dell (and Alienware) is they use proprietary parts, so upgrades are limited at best. I know they also use to default you into buying their extended warranty for a monthly fee, which isn't immediately obvious on their website. I wouldn't recommend them, but just read everything carefully to make sure if you order from them.

[sherrvonne]

I use Google Picasa and Google Nik Collection for my editing purposes, sometimes Microsoft Paint. My editing is sort of plain and simple since I usually shoot what I want in camera for the most part, not requiring much editing.

For storage of my image files I use Western Digital "My Book" external hard drives. The prices on the amount of storage that is available now are reasonable. I can move my files to and from my computer whenever I need to, or look at them on the external drive itself.

Otherwise if you are interested in a new computer with the features to handle softwares and have more storage itself, I myself talked to a Dell computer customer service agent and she asked me what I was going to use my new computer for and I told her what I wanted to do, and she had a Dell desktop computer created for what I needed to do and I bought it. In other words she listened to what I wanted and had it built to specifications that would handle my activities.

As I said before though, if it is storage that you need, external hard drives are very useful.

I have plenty of storage but 8 gb’s of ram

what kind of files do you intend to process on such a machine? it makes a big difference whether you'd doing pixel-shifted 40Gbyte images from a large-format Hassalblad, full-frame high resolution DSLR's, or snapshot JPEG's from an APS-C camera.

[sherrvonne]

what kind of files do you intend to process on such a machine? it makes a big difference whether you'd doing pixel-shifted 40Gbyte images from a large-format Hassalblad, full-frame high resolution DSLR's, or snapshot JPEG's from an APS-C camera.

Raw files from the K3’s, but hope to get a K1 soon". I have chemo/Covid brain now, so my concentration level is like a hdhd teen. I don’t have the mental energy to ‘build’ a pc outside of telling the pc company what I want and have them do it or hopefully have more ram installed on the one I already have.