How much memory would you consider to be enough?

[AlanKlein]

10 hours ago, David_Cavan said:

The configuration I'm closing in on will have 32MB because of some good discounts available.  That's double the 16 I was initially thinking but listening to what this group and some others are telling me it is the right thing to do. Based on advice about the GPU I pushed that up a bit as well, so the cost is beyond my original budget but at this point I'm going to bite the bullet.  My wife reminded me I hadn't spent anything for that past two years and in that time I've gone full-time pro, so in her mind some investment made sense. Upgrades are hopefully at least two years away, at which point who knows, right?

David  Don't chintz if you've gone pro.  Plus you can write off costs. 

[David_Cavan]

6 hours ago, AlanKlein said:

David  Don't chintz if you've gone pro.  Plus you can write off costs. 

Understood. I fully expect that the massive increase in RAM, GPU and processor over my now inadequate little laptop will make me very happy for the next year, and perhaps beyond. If not, there is room for expansion - I'm working on matching revenue and cost for the coming year.

[rodeo_joe1]

On 12/4/2022 at 4:30 PM, mikemorrellNL said:

I have no idea of how easy or difficult it is to expand an SSD 'C drive' containing installed programs and data. I hope that others can provide more advice.

Since the C drive usually holds the operating system, you can't just copy everything across from one drive to another. 

You need to use 'cloning' software, which is freely available. Many SSD manufacturers have it available for download, but that only works if the destination drive is of their make. There are other non-make specific and free drive-cloning programs out there as well.

The software is fairly self-explanatory and easy to use... mostly! 

This only works when upgrading from HDD to SSD, or from a smaller SSD drive to a larger one on the same computer. A 'cloned' disk will not run in a completely different system unless it's pretty much identical in hardware to the original. 

Even upgrading a CPU alone might 'de-license' Windows and require re-entry of the activation code. Since the activated OS is bound to a specific motherboard and hardware configuration. 

Migration to an NVME also presents the issue that most Motherboards only have one NVME/M2 socket, so you can't connect a 2nd drive to copy to, unless you buy an external M2 carrier, or do a cumbersome double-copy via an intermediate drive.

The above is also true if migrating from a non-NVME system to one with an NVME. Either a new OS install has to be done on the NVME drive, or the system booted from an existing OS drive, and then cloned across to the internal NVME. 

Having said that, I would strongly recommend fitting an NVME/M2 drive in any new desktop system. Boot-up time is halved from that of an SSD and even more so compared to an HDD. While file transfer times are greatly speeded up. And should you run out of RAM space, the NVME 'virtual' memory works almost as fast as RAM. 

The takeaway from all this is to fit, or specify, a large capacity OS drive in the first place, in order to avoid time-consuming cloning that might be necessary in future. 

ATM and with current pricing, I personally wouldn't piddle about with anything smaller than 1TB for the OS 'C' drive. Anything less is just penny-pinching and unprepared for any near-future bloatware inflation. 

 

Edited December 6, 2022 by rodeo_joe1

[mikemorrellNL]

6 hours ago, rodeo_joe1 said:

...

Having said that, I would strongly recommend fitting an NVME/M2 drive in any new desktop system. Boot-up time is halved from that of an SSD and even more so compared to an HDD. While file transfer times are greatly speeded up. And should you run out of RAM space, the NVME 'virtual' memory works almost as fast as RAM. 

The takeaway from all this is to fit, or specify, a large capacity OS drive in the first place, in order to avoid time-consuming cloning that might be necessary in future. 

ATM and with current pricing, I personally wouldn't piddle about with anything smaller than 1TB for the OS 'C' drive. Anything less is just penny-pinching and unprepared for any near-future bloatware inflation. 

 

Whoa, @rodeo_joe1! At my age (68), I still still consider myself reasonably 'tech savvy' in a general way. But you're way ahead! I'd never heard of NVME/M2 until now. In fact, the whole idea that are different SSD technologies  (including NVME/M2) was an eye-opener for me. Thanks for this!
 
FWIW I think that your comments and suggestions about the pitfalls of upgrading C drives - especially w.r.t. SSD - are very informative.  For me too.

[AlanKlein]

I recently bought a Dell XPS 8940 desktop with Windows 11, 1TB SSD and 1TB HD with 32GB memory and 11th Gen Intel i9-11900 (8-Core, 16M Cache, 2.5GHz to 5.2GHz).  It boots up from a cold start in about ten seconds.  LR Classic loads in another ten seconds.  I edit 600mb color photo files (from 4x5 scans) in LR Classic along with Premiere Elements video running concurrently.  I've found the most processing memory used doesn;t extend beyond 12GB. But I bought 32GB just in case and for future expansion. 

I keep all my programs on the C drive (SSD) currently 676GB free of 932GB.  I keep all my photos and music on the 1GB HD currently 315GB free of 931GB.  I also connected a Western Digital WD 4TB Passport backup drive to one of my USBs for backup running in the background.  I don't have any cloud backup. So I keep my fire insurance up to date. 🙄

[David_Cavan]

@rodeo_joe1 Thanks - I think (could be wrong of course) that any new build will be a NVME/M2 as that is the standard now. But it is worth checking that if someone is looking at a new machine or potentially getting a used one. The 1TB SSD drive on the build I'm ordering fits that spec.  I'm not planning on cloning/copying the SSD drive from my laptop. Since replacing my working machine is something I do only every few years it is not worth carrying over any bad practices or unused software. The plan is to treat it as a new build - I have the software (and/or the download keys) for what I plan to start with.

I treat data as a separate plan.  All data files, including photos, are kept on a separate drive which in this case will be the second 1TB drive. That's easy to do - my current file management approach is to back those up to the cloud every day, and do physical back-ups monthly, or as needed. So the plan will be to build the new machine, test it with some example data, and then transport the data to the new machine and set the laptop aside for travel purposes.

Edited December 6, 2022 by David_Cavan

[rodeo_joe1]

14 hours ago, David_Cavan said:

I'm not planning on cloning/copying the SSD drive from my laptop.

As I hinted at above, that won't work anyway. A Windows OS is hardware specific once installed, and will probably die with a 'blue screen of death' if you attempt to run it on a different hardware configuration. It'll at the very least de-activate itself and need re-licensing. 

You can't just transfer the programs across either, because they're embedded in the OS. 

I've just been through all this; in order to upgrade my desktop from an aging old 4 core/4 thread CPU running Win 7, to a shiny new whizzo 8 core/16 thread CPU. 

Basically, I had to start over afresh with entirely new hardware, a new OS install of Win 10, and re-installs of all the software (or that which was still useful). The only thing I could successfully transfer from the old machine were my picture, music and document files - most of which were already backed up on external hard-drives anyway. 

The new machine is several times faster, but oh, the joys of keeping abreast of new technology! 😱

Edited December 7, 2022 by rodeo_joe1

[mikemorrellNL]

2 hours ago, rodeo_joe1 said:

As I hinted at above, that won't work anyway. A Windows OS is hardware specific once installed, and will probably die with a 'blue screen of death' if you attempt to run it on a different hardware configuration. It'll at the very least de-activate itself and need re-licensing. 

You can't just transfer the programs across either, because they're embedded in the OS. 

I've just been through all this; in order to upgrade my desktop from an aging old 4 core/4 thread CPU running Win 7, to a shiny new whizzo 8 core/16 thread CPU. 

Basically, I had to start over afresh with entirely new hardware, a new OS install of Win 10, and re-installs of all the software (or that which was still useful). The only thing I could successfully transfer from the old machine were my picture, music and document files - most of which were already backed up on external hard-drives anyway. 

The new machine is several times faster, but oh, the joys of keeping abreast of new technology! 😱

Totally agree that you can't copy Windows to a new machine. If you order a 'custom-configured' desktop, this will almost certainly come with a pre-installed version of Windows + the usual crud anyway.

On the question of transferring programs, I just want to mention that there are Windows 'migration tools' available. On iMacs, migration tools are built in to MacOS. As far as I know, these kinds of tools are not built in to Windows.

When I recently migrated from my 'old' W10 laptop to my new W10 one, I bought 'Laplink PC mover' on-line for about $50. Basically, just to 'automate' the migration via my WIFI rather than spending hours trying to transfer everything manually. I found that Laplink PC mover did a surprisingly good job of migrating not only my (selected) data files but also almost all of my software, accounts and preferences from my old PC to my new one. Sure, I had to log in again to some accounts on my new PC but I never had to re-install any programs.

One of the benefits I found is that I could select which drives/folders on my old PC I wanted to move to which drives/folders on my new PC. I decided to move all my photos and video files out to an external SSD on my new PC. 'Laplink PC mover' also gave me a detailed report on the migration 'success'. 95% was successful but the report also flagged up any programs for which the migration had failed. This report made it much easier for me to decide whether I wanted to re-install any of the 'failed' migrations. In my case, these were all 'old' or seldom-used programs so I did no immediate re-installations. If I ever need them again, I can re-install them.

There are of course alternatives to' Laplink PC mover'. I chose 'Laplink' primarily because it's a brand I recognised from many years ago and 'PC mover' had good reviews.  This is just one more🙂

I consider my $50 well spent just in terms of the time saved. But also in terms of the 'migration reliability'.

Just a couple of examples: Laplink PC mover transferred all my Office 365 programs (including all my Outlook e-mail accounts) and all my Adobe programs (including plug-ins). My Google and Hotmail accounts were also set up in my browser.  Looking back, I'm still amazed about how how 'deep' the migration was and how easy it was! 

Based on my personal experience I would recommend looking into the benefits/costs of 'migration tools' vs. 'manual migration'. FWIW, I later upgraded from W10 to W11 and - although W11 took a bit of getting used to - I had no problems resulting from the W10 migration.

Edited December 7, 2022 by mikemorrellNL

[paddler4]

19 hours ago, David_Cavan said:

@rodeo_joe1 Thanks - I think (could be wrong of course) that any new build will be a NVME/M2 as that is the standard now. But it is worth checking that if someone is looking at a new machine or potentially getting a used one. The 1TB SSD drive on the build I'm ordering fits that spec.  I'm not planning on cloning/copying the SSD drive from my laptop. Since replacing my working machine is something I do only every few years it is not worth carrying over any bad practices or unused software. The plan is to treat it as a new build - I have the software (and/or the download keys) for what I plan to start with.

I treat data as a separate plan.  All data files, including photos, are kept on a separate drive which in this case will be the second 1TB drive. That's easy to do - my current file management approach is to back those up to the cloud every day, and do physical back-ups monthly, or as needed. So the plan will be to build the new machine, test it with some example data, and then transport the data to the new machine and set the laptop aside for travel purposes.

David,

That's precisely what I just did. I treated the C:\drive (an SSD) as a fresh installation and installed everything from scratch. I had most of my data on a second HD, and I replicated that drive. 

However, rather than restore the data drive from a backup, I simply cloned it to an external drive and then back to the new disk. One of my two "backups" is an external mirror that I create with a sync program (these days, the sync function in Directory Opus, which is a superb file  manager), so I had that already to go; I just had to copy it back to the new drive. 

[AlanKlein]

5 hours ago, rodeo_joe1 said:

As I hinted at above, that won't work anyway. A Windows OS is hardware specific once installed, and will probably die with a 'blue screen of death' if you attempt to run it on a different hardware configuration. It'll at the very least de-activate itself and need re-licensing. 

You can't just transfer the programs across either, because they're embedded in the OS. 

I've just been through all this; in order to upgrade my desktop from an aging old 4 core/4 thread CPU running Win 7, to a shiny new whizzo 8 core/16 thread CPU. 

Basically, I had to start over afresh with entirely new hardware, a new OS install of Win 10, and re-installs of all the software (or that which was still useful). The only thing I could successfully transfer from the old machine were my picture, music and document files - most of which were already backed up on external hard-drives anyway. 

The new machine is several times faster, but oh, the joys of keeping abreast of new technology! 😱

When I got 4TB backup disk, there a program with it that allows copying the entire computer.  I started doing that, but there were always changes that kept adding so eventually I'd run out of backup disk space.  So I gave up on full  backup and only backup data, pictures, music, important files, etc. (Documents folder too).  I figure I'd never be able to restore my computer if it failed that way using the full backup.  Do you think that's a good plan?

[digitaldog]

18 minutes ago, AlanKlein said:

When I got 4TB backup disk, there a program with it that allows copying the entire computer.  I started doing that, but there were always changes that kept adding so eventually I'd run out of backup disk space.  So I gave up on full  backup and only backup data, pictures, music, important files, etc. (Documents folder too).  I figure I'd never be able to restore my computer if it failed that way using the full backup.  Do you think that's a good plan?

You asked so the answer is NO.

You need a much better backup schema!

Now if you were on a Mac, you'd have Time Machine making such backups (and automatically deleting the oldest alterations so you don't run out of space). You could go back X number of iterations of a backup until that point. If you edited the same image 10 times over a year, you could go back to each. Nice, useful, not mission critical if your main drive fails. 

So you'd also need a better back schema along with TM that only backups the new changes detected since the last backup. Ideally you'd have multiple drives you rotate as well to avoid losing a backup to drive failure. And a sound backup schema would do the same to a cloud because no, you have no real guarantee that any data you have in your home can't be destroyed and thus lost.   

Two different ways of dealing with backups, one that doesn't allow you to run out of space. One that is safe offsite. 

Of course, some of our data is more valuable than others and I can understand why some don't backup at all (scary but they do), or only backup to one drive or like you, give up on 'copying' the entire 'computer'. 

[David_Cavan]

Lots of different ways to protect data, and each person develops their own sense of what is important, what risks they are willing to take, and what their plan is to deal with that. Personally I've come to the conclusion that I don't want to lose any data so it's easy to come up with a physical on-site, and remote cloud-based plan to cover what I consider the risk to be. As far as software - that's easily replaceable, so I don't back it up, including the configuration files.  It might cause a few days of discomfort to get back to "normal" but I can live with that as long as I've got my data.

[Gary Naka]

Don't buy for today.  You have to buy for tomorrow, even if you don't know what tomorrow will need.

When I made my current desktop, photo editors did not make use of a GPU, so I did not get one.  And that was fine for MANY years.
But today, many editors and add-ons use a GPU.  In fact a GPU is a REQUIREMENT for some sw, like the AI noise reduction SW.
And the GPU requirements have been going up with each new generation of SW.  The GPU that I looked at a couple years ago, is below the min spec for some software today.  ☹️

The computer has to have enough power to run a GPU board.
My computer only has enough power to run the LOW power GPU boards.  But many of those boards do not meet the min specs for some of the SW.  ☹️

Programs expand to use the available memory.
You should size your memory to be LARGER than you think you need, cuz the next version of the SW may want more memory than the current version.
And even if you meet the min, the SW may perform better when you have more than "minimum."
And what other programs will be running at the same time, that will be using memory: the OS, anti virus, browser, mail, music, etc. etc.
I started with 16GB, I then maxed out the computer at 32GB.

 

[David_Cavan]

On 12/7/2022 at 1:29 PM, Gary Naka said:

Don't buy for today.  You have to buy for tomorrow, even if you don't know what tomorrow will need.

When I made my current desktop, photo editors did not make use of a GPU, so I did not get one.  And that was fine for MANY years.
But today, many editors and add-ons use a GPU.  In fact a GPU is a REQUIREMENT for some sw, like the AI noise reduction SW.
And the GPU requirements have been going up with each new generation of SW.  The GPU that I looked at a couple years ago, is below the min spec for some software today.  ☹️

The computer has to have enough power to run a GPU board.
My computer only has enough power to run the LOW power GPU boards.  But many of those boards do not meet the min specs for some of the SW.  ☹️

Programs expand to use the available memory.
You should size your memory to be LARGER than you think you need, cuz the next version of the SW may want more memory than the current version.
And even if you meet the min, the SW may perform better when you have more than "minimum."
And what other programs will be running at the same time, that will be using memory: the OS, anti virus, browser, mail, music, etc. etc.
I started with 16GB, I then maxed out the computer at 32GB.

 

All very true Gary.  I ended up paying more than I had planned. I had thought about 16GB, but ended up with 32 and the box will support up to 128. There are two extra slots for hard drives, and I plan to add 5TBs (hopefully SSDs - we will see) at some point.  The GPU is a mid-range version but WAY faster than anything I have now, and as you say the power supply can support more powerful versions. All-in the box cost about $500 more than originally budgeted but I will have to get a couple of jobs early in the new year to cover that off.  I think it was the right thing to do, and this group has been extremely helpful in this decision. 

Edited December 9, 2022 by David_Cavan