Faster, faster I say! Last weekend I also went and grabbed some computer toys needed tools. I’ve been doing a lot of playing with images and photography and whatnot, and grabbing 50 or 300 mb images from my fileshare has been making my little system cry. I headed out and grabbed a DLink DGS-1005D 1000/100/10 mb switch and a couple of Intel Pro 1000 NICS. After a bit of finageling to swap around cards and IPs, two of my systems, (main windows box and file server) are running at gigabit ethernet. Nice improvement in speed too, copying a 700mb movie file from one to the other now feels like I’m copying a 20mb file. Sweet!
I also got another gigabyte of ram for the photoshop box. It’s about the only upgrade I can do right now that’ll give it an appreciative speed increase and not have me replace the entire system. Working in photoshop feels a lot less taxing now, there’s not that groan each startup and shutdown as memory is swapped in and out of swapspace (normally while mucking in PS I’m running at about 1.1G of used RAM). Sadly it didn’t seem to help at all for the latest game addiction, Battlefield 2142 though 🙁 Guess that’ll need a CPU or video card bump…