Toronto Photography Meetup Group

Dell has a sale now for $999 on a XPS studio destop. Equipped with i7 920, 8GB ram, ATI4350 512MB graphics and 1TB hard drive. It comes with Vista home premium 64-bits.

What do you think about this for photo editing and CS4/LR applications? Most important of all, is this a good deal???

I haven't looked at desktops in a while, but that seems like a good deal. Keep in mind (if you don't have one) you're going to need a proper monitor for it. I'm assuming if you buy it now it'll come with a free upgrade to Windows 7.[/b]

Yup, it comes with Windows 7 as a free upgrade. I already have a NEC2690WUXi.

You may ultimately find the 64 bit O/S to be a detriment due to how little is made for it, though it does give access to the additional memory.

The issues with software support are rapidly receding as 64bit OS's become the norm on mid/high-range consumer systems. Now that PS is 64 bit under windows with CS4, most photographic software has been updated to either run fine in 32 bit mode or be 64 bit capable. I've found that even running mostly 32 bit software on a 64 bit system can be a big win because of the additional memory allocation each program can have. Running PS CS3 with 100% memory allocation does wonders for its responsiveness, even when running Bridge and 1-2 other memory-intensive applications.

The only issue I'm having even with my legacy software is that my calibration puck has no software which will function correctly with 64 bit video drivers.

Make sure the drive and video are fast not dogs or some of the speed is wasted.

Video's not an issue these days with any discrete card unless you're gaming or making a Hackintosh (As OS X can offload processing to the GPU with any software that supports Core Image)

And that is the main issue; device drivers. If you have limited software that you want to run then you can work around the 64 bit issue, but printers etc. are currently poorly supported.

Device drivers really aren't an issue anymore, unless you're running XP64. Pretty much all Vista drivers are available in 64bit versions unless they're for legacy hardware (more than 2-3 years old). The large number of new systems coming with 64bit OS's has really driven up the support for them. Support has massively changed over the last 8-12 months.

Well I have a massive amount of legacy equipment to support and it would be nice if manufacturers would occasionally go back and update. The exception seems to be Lexmark, who have been pushing out generic drivers that support a wide range of their printer products.

Unfortunately a lot of manufacturers love the idea of forced obsolescence and use driver support in newer OS revisions to do so. This was a major factor in the failure of the Vista launch and it looks like they'll be using Windows 7 the same way.

ATi's already obsoleted a large number of their older products as of the current driver revision (Catalyst 9.4), even relatively recent hardware based on older cores.

I remember something about using Windows Server 2003 drivers for XP64...

And those drivers aren't exactly common either. XP64 has very little support for consumer peripherals and much of that comes from Vista 64bit drivers with XP64 support.