My HD is about two years old, a WD 200GB SATA and yes I could use it as a backup. But first I will try a memory upgrade in fact an email has just popped up telling me it's been despatched

Back in '96 I bought a P100 PC, with a massive 1GB HD, DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11, 16MB RAM all for £1911.73 pence

btw that's 1996

I know, it's ridiculous To think I paid 120 quid for a 1GB not that long ago and now they are half that for a terabyte

I would build another totally new PC if I could guarantee that my existing 200GB hard drive would work with it

Thanks both for your comments. I do have a more modern Acer laptop with 1GB of RAM but not a big HD so perhaps will try that. On my PC it perhaps takes around 30/40 seconds to process a 10MB RAW image.

I'm always cleaning up the HD and defragging However, I have ordered a 1GB module so will add it to one of my 250s and see what happens!

I have just ventured into using RAW on my K-m and of course produce far better images when printing. However, my 5 year old (1.8GHz Sempron with 512MB PC2700 DDRSDRAM) PC is rather slow at processing RAW data. I would be grateful for recommendations for a minimum spec PC for this purpose please or would a straight memory upgrade suffice?

I am using the supplied Pentax editing software and also IrfanView on my XP machine and also looking for some Debian based Linux applications.

Thanks for the welcome Tracey. You certainly seem to have a good selection of wildlife down in Deeping St. James Hoping to get down to Freiston Shore soon to capture the Avocet!

Well there's one here http://highbeacon.www.idnet.com/Pentax/ towards the bottom of the page, finished off with my contrary granddaughter leaving me

Never heard of Gimpshop, thanks! Downloaded it on my XP box and it keeps throwing up 'exception' errors : Will try on one of my Linux machines later to see if it behaves there.

Thanks for comment. Photoscape actually has quite a few hidden attributes that aren't obvious until you get into it!! I have GIMP on my Linux PCs and find that rather hard work as I lack the patience to learn

Has anyone tried free PhotoScape www.photoscape.org/ps/main/index.php and have any views on its abilities? I've been trying it for a week or so and find it quite effective compared with my rather old version of PSP8.