Digital Photography

PC System

When I was editing video clips with Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 to make a "movie" of my recent (May 2007) safari in Tanzania, it was painfully clear that my Dell Dimension 4300 has become a dinosaur despite a number of upgrades I had made. Accordingly, I decided to replace it. Upon doing some research, I decided it would be better and much less expensive to build my own system by buying components. (I used to build my own system before I purchased Dell Dimesion 4300 about five and a half years ago.)

I purchased pretty much everything: case, power supply, motherboard, CPU, RAM, graphics card, disk drive, DVD drive, multi-card reader/floppy drive combination, wireless mouse and keyboard, and a new operating system. The only components from the old PC that I reused were the second disk drive and external hard drive. Since I purchased a 22" wide-screen LCD monitor earlier this year (2007), there was no need to purchase a new one.

Model	assembled at home
Motherboard	Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R 775
CPU:	Intel E6750 Core 2 Duo Processor
RAM:	8 GB SDRAM - Corsair DDR2 800MHz
Hard Drives (internal):	400 GB Seagate SATA/300 Barracuda; 500 GB Seagate SATA/300 Barracuda;
Hard Drive (external):	300 GB dual-interface external hard drive 500GB Seagate Free Agent ext. hard drive
DVD Drive	Samsung 18x DVD+R burner with 12x DVD-RAM write and with LightScribe Technology.
Floppy Drive/ Multi-card Reader	Mitsumi Internal USB 2.0 digital card reader with 1.44MB 3.5" floppy drive
Graphics Card:	EVGA GeForce 8800GTS (320MB)
Sound Card:	Integrated
Mouse & Keyboard:	Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse
Operating System:	Windows XP Professional

You may have noticed that I'm still running Windows XP Professional, not Windows Vista. Although all the components I used to assemble the PC were supposed to be compatible with the new operating system, I decided to keep Win XP because I do not like to use the version 1.0 of anything by Microsoft.

I suppose that I could use a separate speaker system, but for my needs the speakers built into the monitor is sufficient for now. I'll eventually have to purchase a larger external disk drive for archiving.

Now that I have a very powerful system, I'm looking forward to maintaining and improving my website. Also, I expect to spend more time editing videos.