Archived from groups: alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt (
More info?)
On Sat, 19 Feb 2005 20:32:00 -0500, Ruel Smith <NoWay@NoWhere.com>
wrote:
I only have a Radeon 9600 card in
>it.
>
I have a Radeon 8500 in mine, but it's good enough to run a much newer
Viewsonic 19" LCD without flicker and in plenty of colours.
>Yeah, and unfortunately, the 64 bit hardware stuff happened waaay too soon
>for me. The software just isn't there to take advantage of it and I'm
>afraid that if I buy now, when it does finally release and become stable,
>the cost of my same hardware will be half of what I would have paid for it.
>Therefore, I sit and I wait.
Exactly.
>
>
>SATA is nice if you run a RAID system and have fast drives. I have an ATA133
>RAID system with WD Caviar 160GB 8MB drives and he has 80GB Caviar 8MB
>disks. His RAID system is somewhat faster. He uses the Intel ICH5R chipset
>for his RAID, and I have a Promise onboard controller.
I have a Promise controller sitting in a box. I suspect this current
box will become a RAID system when I "retire" it in favour of the next
God-box. Right now, I just do timed backups of all data partitions
over a network to a truly antique dual PII (circa 1997) tower stuffed
with mirrored drives.
>
>I'm still debating on the dual core thing. Will there be anything that'll
>really take advantage of it? Games, maybe. I do game a little, and my P4
>system could use a graphics card. However, I'll wait and see just how
>effective they are once they're released.
I also am not clear of the advantage of dual core vs. dual processor,
although I believe I understand the concept from an architecture and
resources point of view. I am fully committed to dual processors,
though, as they have been a total boon in wringing out the most
processes and threads from my existing hardware. I frequently run
InDesign, Photoshop batches, a peer-to-peer client, a network backup,
E-mail, browser and MP3 playback at the same time (yeah, it's busy
around here, but most people in my business do the same). A single
processor couldn't deal with the number of tasks...even so, I
bluescreen under W2K about twice a week. The box is never off
otherwise.
>
>
>Well, you could download and install The Gimp on your system, and try it out
>and get used to it. If you're using Photoshop 5, The Gimp 2.0 or better
>should be at least equal in most ways. It just doesn't do some of the more
>recent features such as layer styles and such. Then when you're ready, you
>can try Linux and use The Gimp.
I know, but my clients use Quark, PageMaker and now InDesign. There's
no migration path that can accommodate me running pure Linux and them
running a Win 2000 office with legacy Win 98 and newer Win XP stuff.
Not that I am aware of.
>
>For page layouts, there's Scribus. I haven't used it much, and can't compare
>it to other page layout programs on the Windows side. I've used Quark, but
>I'm no pro at it. Likewise, I've only scratched the surface of using
>Scribus. However, it does seem pretty powerful. Don't know if it'll save in
>a Quark or Pagemaker filetype, which might be necessary if you need to
>publish and those filetypes are required.
>
>http://www.gimp.org/
>http://www.scribus.org.uk/
I will look at it, but it's likely it would have to wait until I can
produce a PDF-only workflow, in which case the native layout app won't
be seen by the clients, and so it would just mean decent PDF creation
and editing for the print shop.
>
>As you can see from my signature, I love Linux. I won't say it's for
>everyone, but it certainly is for me. For everyday tasks, I use Linux. I
>game some in Windows, and I occasionally use Photoshop or something else.
>However, 90% of my time is in Linux.
Nice. I have the OS, and that's about it. I use Open Office, Firefox,
Eudora, Free Agent, Grisoft AVG, the graphics apps and a whack of
utilities, firewall and comm applications....mostly free. Life without
Microsoft's products is...more productive.
Thanks for the thoughts.
R.
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