Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums General Common Interests About to give up on my PCs, comtemplating a MAC...

Portability is important for my primary computer (often work remotely, this harddrive is my life), but I could start using a dedicated desktop for graphics work as that stuff is not my primary duty and doesn't need to be portable.

Only thing is, the laptop is my fastest machine right now, guess there's not much choice but to wait a while until I have the funds to get a new desktop.

Is there any real need to upgrade to SATA, or should I be ok striping two older 7200 rpm drives?

Serial ATA will be the new standard so depending on how long you wait you may not have a choice. The drives(SATA vs ATA) are pretty close in price and most mid to upper level motherboard are SATA ready, some with the RAID controler built in. I just built an external striped set for a friend who's big into video. She takes that with her, work, home, studio, location wherever she has to go. How good are you with computer hardware? Good enough to build your own? That will save you some frog skins.

If you want to go to a Mac system, do a search for PearOS. Here: http://pearpc.sourceforge.net
That will allow you to run a Mac oerating system on regular PC hardware .... until of course you decide to buy a Mac
You might also want to consider the Linux options. You could probably set up a surprisingly well preforming Linux box on your existing hardware. Between the programs 'gimp' and 'sodipodi' and a few others, you can do just about anything with graphics (Window$ versions exist too).
In other words, Adobe and Corel aren't the only options.

Unless you're editing HUGE graphics, your Win machines shouldn't be brought to a crawl unless there's something else playing a factor. Such as wrong swap file size, too many running services, or spyware/virus.

Even if you run Norton or Macaffeefefeee or whatever their name, you aught to download and run the latest trial version of Kaspersky antivirus. http://www.kaspersky.com
'cause it's known to uproot virus variants which Norton and Mcaffee don't (such as the .h variant of 'paylap').