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What PC should I buy?

re_cord_man

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Posted July 6, 2012 at 6:54PM

I use my home PC mostly for both Family History research and processing photos and negatives/slides. I always scan any negs or slides in maximum resolution and save them as TIFF images for later processing in Elements/Lightroom. Am I better getting a quad core PC or not, and what would the best spec for me to look for? (I currenly have archived some 40,000 images and still have around 5000 to do at least.) My present PC struggles to cope with image processing very quickly and I find it very frustrating to be waiting for it to process.

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frybluff

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Posted July 6, 2012 at 9:12PM

I know nothing about familly history research, but most (as far as I know, all) Adobe photographic software can use Intel's hyperthreading. So, as you move up, through i3 to i5 to i7, you will get improvements in photo processing speed, so it's a question of how far your budget will stretch. A decent amount of RAM (6GB+) helps, as does a good amount of fast access storage.

Graphics tends to be more of an issue with video, but, if you believe all of Intel's sales hype, the HD4000 graphics on the latest Ivybridge series is very good.

If you check out Chillblast's website, they have a whole section, on photo and video systems. Their high end offerings are very much video orientated, but more modest ones would be suitable.

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Woolwell

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Posted July 7, 2012 at 5:28PM

Family History doesn't require much from a computer. Photo storage though does. 1 Tb hard drive minimum possibly 2 500 Gb and back up, back up, back up!

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