Starting a digital Darkroom

[Trevor Ash]

I totally disagree. You can instruct the operating system (some registry setting) to make full use of the memory and it'll make your OS lightning fast. It will cost you about 500MB though.
What do you consider day to day activities? Starting programs all the time (then you'll need a fast drive) or working for hours in programs like Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Internet Browser, 3D software, etc. Trust me, people rather like to have a 3.4 Ghz processor (I don't even mention dual processors) with fast 2GB ram to run programs like Photoshop and Cinema 4D than a fast drive.

You can even instruct the OS to use a larger memory cache (don't confuse with swap file!), which will speed up overall performance.

I also disagree with you, but using the same caveat you did ("What do you consider day to day activities?")

If working with large images and saving at a decent rate, it makes a difference. Having your ps swap on a fast drive makes a difference too. But as you said, so does RAM.

If you're running windows XP your computer can boot up soooooo much faster with fast hard drives.....I'm talking 10 seconds to desktop after your bios is loaded (depending on many other things of course).

Could you elaborate more about this comment:
"You can instruct the operating system (some registry setting) to make full use of the memory and it'll make your OS lightning fast"

What setting? What do you mean by lightning fast? How much faster is that than without the setting change?

"Trust me, people rather like to have a 3.4 Ghz processor (I don't even mention dual processors) with fast 2GB ram to run programs like Photoshop and Cinema 4D than a fast drive"

What tasks are they performing? Have they ever seen the diference that a hard drive makes in just day to day activities?

If the original poster is only using 10MB files then yah, the hard drive isn't going to matter much. But if the poster is working of multi layered 300MB files is makes a huge difference in opening writing, and ps operation due to the way photoshop uses disk cache. I agree that ram and processor make the biggest difference once you have the image loaded. But there are daily benefits to fast hard drives beyond the photo editing process (like booting up the os as described before). Another example is if you play games (which the poster probably doesn't do). Map based games will load MUCH quicker and generally perform better because the hard drive processing queue is always empty or near empty.

Remember, your system is only as fast as it's slowest component.

Here's some stuff I dug up at adobe about improving performance:
http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/2a7d6.htm
http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/12dde.htm

Note that in the second link is does in fact state: "The performance of Photoshop is affected most by available random-access memory (RAM) and computer processor speed. Other factors can also affect performance, such as the options you select, system configuration, and the built-in limitations of Photoshop."

[Trevor Ash]

BTW, I think I lost track of my own original point. Which was about day to day activities, not necessarily heavy duty photoshop or video editing. Oh well