I was naughty, but now I can change what colors my LED's glow......

So as a photographer I've run into complications as of late. I purchased a laptop (with it's 20" monitor people think I'm a bit nutty, but at the time it was a desktop replacement and where it has a duo-core 2.0 ghz processor I wasn't worried about the 256 mb video card {GPU} that it had, and I was naive enough to not realize to never ever ever buy ATI let alone ATI Mobility {which are really half of what you think they are, they steal half of their "power" from your ram} but I figured the 4 gigs of ram that I had would make up for the weak video card...again...naive). Wow, that was a bit long. I purchased it at the beginning of last year.

So, in August I was able to get money together and purchase CS3, it had a funny piece of paper taped to it saying that I was eligible for an upgrade. Oh well, whatever, I had the software I wanted right? About a month later I heard about CS4 coming out and got excited, I checked on the upgrade information and it turned out I was going to be getting a free suite upgrade (some guy in the bookstore said I'd probably be getting a flash upgrade or something because there was a new release ove the summer that he didn't think was in the DVD). He was wrong. Very wrong, I got the new toy!

Well, I got the software in October or so, was showing it off at school, even the art department didn't get their copies until a week or two before the end of school, (that little time but they're teaching on it this term, lol) so I was a bit proud of myself. The only issue I had was getting CS4 to actually run, I've mentioned most all of this before but CS4 runs off of the GPU as opposed to it's predecessors which all rans of the CPU(s), so at this point the video card (ram excluded) became very crucial. I wasn't able to utilize it's abilities on my laptop. Right now I have Photoshop open, and it's merging some 84 images into a 3D panoramic.

I cheated.

I was naughty.

The GPU in the laptop/notebook/beast of a machine, is irreplaceable, I can't pull it out and put in something else, and neither can Dell. It's that way with most notebooks, and as such the same with most all all-in-one computers.

I'm not doing this on my notebook/beast of a machine/laptop.

I was naughty.

I did comparison builds, I could make a machine from Mac that would run me around 8 grand, and it would be something I would hate the rest of my life. I could build an awesome nearly 6 grand machine from Dell that matched the specs from the Mac that I'd built. I also did a custom build through newegg.com From them the same machine (exactly the same as the Dell but with better components) would have run me just under 4 grand.

Some time passed by.

The need for it increased.

I tried some more builds.

We sold our microwave.

Turns out the guy we sold it to is a photographer, and we started talking, he told me about slickdeals.net I checked it out, there are some cool things there, but I didn't find anything I really was interested in, though it did take me to the Dell Outlet.

I started looking on the Dell outlet, figuring what I could get by without having, and what types of systems would still be customizable enough that I could get away with buying it now and upgrading it myself later.

Time passed (8 hours?)

I placed an order.

Time passed.

I did a comparison build through a student pricing available with Dell, and checked what the cost would be to make the same system at student pricing. $800 more than I was going to be paying.

Got the desktop today. Got a monitor today, the other one is coming early next week.

Found some toys on my system that I didn't know about.

As I looked under it's skirt I noticed it looked like there were two GPU's, but the system only says there's one. CS4 was saying something funny about a Graphics Accelerator. Turns out that Dell didn't mention, but the system came with a bonus item, a Graphics Accelerator. Now I have an 84 image compilation that made my laptop cry for hours, and I started it less than half an hour ago. Looks like the file is around 2gb in size and nothing has crashed, and nothing has slowed.

Another cool feature. Nvidia has software installed on my system that allows me to overclock my Ram, CPU, GPU, and motherboard. I can also control my fan's speeds manually, and there's 4 sections of LED lights that I can control their color...


I was naughty.


But I can finally utilize features of Photoshop that I wasn't able to use, and I did it all for under $2,500.