[davemdsn]

Well, there is a small flaw in this discussion about having to buy a new Mac in a few years vs upgrading the hardware in an old PC. In fact, I can think of two.

The first is that I tried to upgrade my father's PC notebook last summer with new ram and HD. The properly specs hardware was discontinued and the notebook is not upgradable. The notebook itself is worth about it's weight in poop so when he gets a new one he will be trashing the old one.

On the other hand is the other flaw I see. A friend of mine has been using Macs at work and home for a long time. He uses them for a good 5 years before he replaces them (and he is able to run up to date OS and software on them - try running Vista on a 5 year old machine). His last home machine was a notebook that he got refurbished for $1700. At the end of the 5 years he sold it for $600. That made it cheaper then my last PC notebook and it lasted longer.

Mac only looks more expensive. I got my first one last summer after 17 years of PC. For what you get, how long it lasts, and it's resale value even 5 years later make it a great investment. I have no regrets.

[Canada_Rockies]

Well, there is a small flaw in this discussion about having to buy a new Mac in a few years vs upgrading the hardware in an old PC. In fact, I can think of two.

The first is that I tried to upgrade my father's PC notebook last summer with new ram and HD. The properly specs hardware was discontinued and the notebook is not upgradable. The notebook itself is worth about it's weight in poop so when he gets a new one he will be trashing the old one.

Tell your dad to pull the hard drive out of the old notebook. For about $25, you can buy a USB drive case for the 2.5" drive, and use it for portable storage. I have a 20 Gb and 40 Gb in drive cases. The 40 is my backup image disk set in Lightroom. Works great, and I can find the images that I blew off the first time - erroneously!

[PDL]

I'm using PC's for the price issue also. A desktop can be upgraded with a new motherboard and processor very inexpensively. MAC's are priced about the same as a decent PC ( I would never buy a low end cheapo PC ) but after 3 or 4 years you will need to buy another if you want more speed and newer features where with a PC its a little shopping on New Egg and you can have a new screamer for a few hundred. I've held off for now upgrading or buying a Vista machine because I've heard a lot of these reports about software not working well. I added memory and a new hard drive to my P4 XP computer and its working quite well. A fresh XP install, another gig of memory and I hope to get another year or so and by then all the wrinkles should be out of Vista. I use the Windows computer mostly for photos and Video and a Linux computer for everything else. I just get better results doing photo editing with Elements. I have considered buying Lightroom but don't want to get stuck with an expensive program that won't work if I buy a Vista box or upgrade to Vista. At least Adobe has the free trial downloads so you can see if it will work. Hopefully soon, the open source software will improve so none of this will be an issue.

I have a 5 year old (design wise) mother board running a 3.0Ghz P4. I blew up the motherboard about 2 years ago and had to go to a web site that had old obsolete motherboards to get another one of the same model. (I bought a P4 3.0 GHz too, because I thought I fried the CPU - now I have a CPU that I can not get to fit into any motherboard).

This motherboard has run Windows 2000 Server, Windows XP Pro and now is running Vista Ultimate. With 2GB of memory, a 7 year old IDE 133 disk controller (the on board only supports IDE 100), a 6 year old NVidea 256MB video controller and a SATA RAID controller - that is also out of production. Issues with Vista - my late 90's Turbo CAD program will not run, one blue screen (Lightroom 1.2 - an Adobe memory allocation issue) and Windows update tries to put the wrong sound card drivers on it.

That's it - no problem - o. Solid as a rock. Every version of Lightroom has run just fine on this box - either using XP or Vista (over a year now). McAfee has some issues, but they are a strange group of people anyway. Not the fastest thing on the block - runs at a 3.3 on the Vista scale of what you think you gotta have. Aero interface works, sound works, disks work, internet works, printer (6 years old) works. The only build issues I had was that I needed to get drivers for the old IDE 133 card so the d*mn thing would install. After the first MS update - all systems were working as planned.

The rumors of Vista driver issues is long since past. Running Lightroom 1.4.1, CS3 and most other editing programs is simple - put the disk in and load away. (PPB/PPL v3.51 work just fine - thank you very much - as does the new Pentax -- er Hoya codec)

The Elitist - formerly known as PDL

[falconeye]

backup image disk set in Lightroom.

@Canada_Rockies: I am sure you know, really! But double-checking never hurts. The catalog backup in LR does only backup the meta data, not the images themselves...

[reeftool]

Thanks for the info PDL. I'm looking to upgrade to a dual or quad core mother board next year and am leery of buying any software right now that may not work.
davemdsn- I was refering to upgrading desktops, not laptops. Laptops aren't easily upgradeable other than adding memory or a larger hard drive. However an ATX standard mid tower has so many possibilitys it can be mind boggling. You can spend hours checking out motherboards with price ranges from 29.95 on up into the hundreds. I built my wifes desktop for under 200 3 years ago and its still working fine although kind of slow by todays standards. If you start out with a quality, not cheapo, mid tower ATX machine from Dell, Gateway, or another you can upgrade the tower easily. Laptops are disposable, although convienient.

[emalvick]

Thanks for the info PDL. I'm looking to upgrade to a dual or quad core mother board next year and am leery of buying any software right now that may not work.
davemdsn- I was refering to upgrading desktops, not laptops. Laptops aren't easily upgradeable other than adding memory or a larger hard drive. However an ATX standard mid tower has so many possibilitys it can be mind boggling. You can spend hours checking out motherboards with price ranges from 29.95 on up into the hundreds. I built my wifes desktop for under 200 3 years ago and its still working fine although kind of slow by todays standards. If you start out with a quality, not cheapo, mid tower ATX machine from Dell, Gateway, or another you can upgrade the tower easily. Laptops are disposable, although convienient.

I just built a quad core motherboard and made the jump to Vista at the same time (64bit version). I haven't had any problems with any software. Occasionally, I have to install a program running in XP compatibility mode, but that has probably been 2 out of 100+ programs I've installed on the computer. Now I feel like I could possibly run Lightroom. My old computer was 8 years old and actually still runninq quite well until the Motherboard, CPU, and Powersupply all faded at once. The only thing that really slowed the computer down was processing RAW files, and even that wasn't as bad as I had imagined with such an old computer. I decided it was probably time to just dismiss of the whole system and build a new one. It's hard to complain from having 8 years from a system and being able to easily swap out and upgrade elements here and there as I did.

I really wish Macs offered some of those benefits. I don't doubt that Macs offer a good performance for the money, but I am not sure it is easy, possible, or economical to upgrade aspects of a Mac.

[reeftool]

Sorry its taken a few days, I had 2 cars break down and not much time to go online or do much with my camera although I did get some pictures over the weekend. I just had to replace 1 car (old one had 260K miles and i'm getting to old to lay in the dirt and pull trannies any more) so I will try to stretch what I have for a little longer and won't upgrade unless I have to. I do tend to keep my stuff for a long time (Adirondack redneck thing) and probably too long. I also shoot some video and my 2.4 gig P4 really slows down. After editing it takes around 45 minutes to save and burn a 15 minute movie so its time for an upgrade.