So, you now have PSE, some 'stuff' to start with, now what. Well, my next issue was with my hardware. I had a decent computer, but we hadn't purchased it with memory and hard-drive hogging PSE in mind. And I had a tiny little monitor. It was a workable computer though. I think my first purchase was an external hard drive. And external hard drive (EHD) is a hard drive in a case that you plug in through your USB ports on the computer. We found a pretty good deal on a hard drive at Best Buy and used that, I think it's 120GB or something in that range. I highly recommend an EHD, they are handy, portable, and relatively inexpensive. But, they are running through a USB which makes it slower. And accessing files constantly can be frustrating when it's slow. So, for one of those holidays that men are supposed to buy something for their wives, Mr. P got me a second internal hard drive - 350GB. Now part of that went to system backup (in case our main hard drive failed), but the rest, 250GB, went all to me and my new addiction. So if you have the ability, it wasn't much more time and expense to install a second hard drive in my desktop PC. It did take a little effort because they sent the wrong clips to install it, but really not much overall. And since its directly connected, it's much faster.
So, then the issue became memory. PSE (and really any Adobe program) is a huge memory hog. And my little 512mb of RAM wasn't doing it. So for another one of those pesky holidays that men are supposed to buy gifts for their wives, my husband bought me 2 sticks of 1GB RAM (total 2GB). My computer was now lightning fast :)
And then for Valentine's day Mr. P bought me a huge 20-inch monitor. Let me tell you how wonderful a humongous widescreen monitor is (and brag on what a great husband I have)
Now, all that might seem to make the investment pretty high, but I did not start out with that stuff. I scrapped happy and slow on my tiny monitor for a long while before these upgrades and you can too!
I recently upgraded to an iMac with a ginormous monitor (23? 24-inch? I don't even know, it's just stinkin' big). It's fast and has 1TB of hard drive space which I'm very happy with. I'm still learning the ins and outs of a Mac, but I've been happy with my scrapping for the most part.
Hardware makes the digi scrapping experience either so-so or suh-weet, but you can scrap with what you have right now (most likely, no guarantees obviously).
Continued in Part 4
No comments:
Post a Comment