Perez Studios

These 34 brand new Acer Desktops/Monitor Combos were delivered on Friday and today I get to begin cloning them using Storage Craft.  

I am working on building a new PC and I must say it gets pricey when you want to add things like redundancy.  I have been purchasing most of the parts from New Egg which is really great with the prices.  In fact I think just about all of the parts came from New Egg except for the processor which I got from my friend.  Nothing fancy on the cpu but my friend is going to over clock it for me.  Here is what we have in it so far.

This does not count all the taxes and shipping for all the different times I had to buy this and then realized I needed this.  That is always a pain.  I plan on installing Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit on the OS.  I also have a 120GB SATA drive that I plan on hosting my OS on and using the 4 – 1.5TB drives in a RAID 5 configuration and use it to store my music, photos and documents on.  I will have another 1.5TB drive that I plan on using for Backups which I know I will have to upgrade that soon to keep all the backups on.  Thankfully I use Storage Craft to do all my backups and I must say it is the coolest way for backups. 

If anyone has any feedback I would appreciate it.  I am hoping to have this system up and running by next Friday since I have a Photography Gig coming up.  Wish me luck folks!

I have been wondering where do you professional photographers store your photos after so many years?  I have a 1.5TB drive as my Main drive and another 1.5TB drive as my backup which I use Storage Craft’s Shadow Protect to backup but what do the pros use?  I use Adobe Lightroom 2.0 to keep track of all my photos but as I begin to run at about 300GB left on the 1.5TB Main Drive I am wondering should I archive them onto DVD and keep them in a safe or what? 

Anyone with any ideas I would appreciate the help!

Recently, I upgraded my computer to Vista Ultimate.  I must say that it has been a very cool move.  I first backed up my entire system before I did anything using a program called Storage Craft which I must say works great. 

Once I had the backup I was ready to make the move.  The look and feel of Vista is pleasing to the eyes.  It does some wear and tear to the memory though.  I have about 2Gigs of Ram in my machine and am already looking at upgrading it to 4 because of the amount that Vista sucks up. 

Vista has some really cool features for photographers.  One is the Windows Photo Gallery.  Viewing pictures in Vista does seem a bit prettier on the eyes.  It somehow gives the photos a look to them.  The built in slide show feature that is similar to the one in Windows XP is a lot easier to view. 

I did however encounter some issues with some hardware and software.  I came across an issue with Adobe Encore 1.5 so now I am forced to upgrade to a newer version.  I also came across an issue with my Epson R1800  Photo printer.  It turns out that the FireWire port on the back of the printer is not compatible with Vista but the USB port worked just fine.  I also came across an issue with my Creative Sound card but I am working on resolving that issue with Creative. 

If you have any experiences with Vista that you would like to share with the rest of us please feel free to do so.  I am sure there are others out there that are kind of hesitant about making the move but it is something that has to happen.  Windows 7 is supposed to be coming out soon and I am sure we will feel the same about that one like we did about Vista.