In my view the price war resumed when Nikon announced the D7000 pricing.

I could do with a new desktop replacement laptop as well, but even the new Sandy Bridge architecture platform appears to impose an 8gb memory cap; this is the key issue for me with my machine currently drawing 8.8gb out of hours -- maybe the new AMD platform will come to the rescue!

As for your plan, you will want to make your own mind up about this, but IMO you should defer notions of impending computing austerity until you have got the thing up and running.

Ubuntu is really a very nice system indeed, and is particularly well suited to laptops with a low system overhead and the use of multiple virtual desktops; I have no doubt you will find your existing machine snappy and responsive.

But I did make one error above; the application I was thinking of is called Darktable, not Darkroom. Also you probably already know this, but be careful selecting the right NAS box; some of them are reported to have unbearably noisy fans.

Good luck!

I am not really convinced you will see that great an improvement in cpu power moving to an i3, at least for the non-Sandy Bridge crop.

Since practically all the software you use is open source, have you considered just buying a new hard disk and installing Ubuntu on your existing machine, for example along with the open source Darkroom app for which glowing reports exist?

I think you would get at least as good a perceived performance improvement as from moving to an i3, and if you hate it you can probably repurpose the hard disk somehow.

In any case if you are set on buying a new machine I would certainly wait until the Sandy Bridge architecture i3 processors are in the mainstream, no longer than by the summer I would have thought.

Got myself a new secondhand laptop off eBay last November; Thinkpad T60, 2Ghz Core Duo, 2gb ram, excellent 1400x1050 4:3 aspect screen and reasonable dedicated ATI graphics, top notch build quality and great keyboard.

Would have cost from new at a guess £1200-1500 but mine ex leasing came to £190 delivered. New battery @ £35 (~5 hours) and a replacement hard disk from the draw and I have a 14” comfortably lapable laptop I am delighted with. In fact I liked it so much I bought another one for my dad for Christmas.

BTW, the OpenOffice developers have jumped ship to LibreOffice, with the hated Oracle now in charge; that’s where it’s at! Much better .docx support too.

On the front of the panel there are some control buttons. One of those is likely to allow you to switch between input types: VGA/DVI (mine look like screens with an arrow pointing in from the left).

Press that button and make sure it is set to VGA/Analogue, which should flash up on the panel; if it doesn't it has developed a fault.

Clearly the destruction of the personal files in immediately accessible form should never have taken place, but I take a somewhat different perspective on all this, and find the veil of silence that has descended on the other thread regrettable.

Reading between the lines it doesn’t take much imagination to guess what sort of investigation the poster got himself entangled in. Ordinarily these types of operations must by definition be held confidential; they are rightly outside the scope of public scrutiny and likely also conventional forms of executive branch oversight.

This is to a large extent predicated on the public’s trust that the officers so employed are skilled and work diligently behind the scenes, but here we lean that they appear more akin to oafish, blundering thugs. This is hardly reassuring, and something I would have thought certainly not in the public interest to hush up.

Why Did Someone Pay $104,000 For This Battered Old Camera? (Gizmodo)

There’s one more important factor that you should consider to maximise the longevity of your new computer; the SATA ports for connecting disk drives should be of the SATA 3 (/III) variety (fully backwards compatible).

Hard disk performance is undoubtedly the key system performance bottleneck and although there is little on the market that challenges the throughput capacity of the current SATA II standard this will change in the next few years.

For that reason it is in my opinion also worth looking for a motherboard that provides native support for the new USB 3 standard; just a couple of ports are needed to support the faster external drives that are already appearing on the market.

In practice these factors further skew the platform choice in favour of AMD, specifically a motherboard with the 890 series chipset (with or without onboard graphics).

Good luck with your shopping!

That's right, the lizard men space aliens masquerading as bankers have taken it all back to Planet X.

Bwaaaaahhahaahhaha.

As others have said a dual core system is more than adequate for running Windows 7 and the applications you need, but the price difference between that and something better is negligible and simply not an area worth saving on.

Far more important as regards future proofing is the choice of ‘platform’. That is the circuitry around the processor in general and specifically the shape of the mount that holds it, which determines your ability to upgrade in future.

Both Intel and AMD offer two main consumer type platforms. In terms of pure performance Intel is the leader, however, they are bringing out a new generation of cpus early next year that will not be compatible with the existing - socket 1156 - platform.

Likely for marketing reasons AMD appear to be more loyal to their platforms and are in my opinion currently unbeatable in terms of price/performance, with their AM3 platform/socket.

The AM3 processor line-up has various models with different features where the key trade-off is performance/power consumption, with lower power consumption (measured in TDW) at a premium. I wouldn’t look at anything with less than 3 cores and - depending on how many people in your household might need computer power combined with your appetite for virtualisation - up to 6 cores.

You need to pair the cpu with a motherboard - either Asus of Gigabyte are the safest bets - and suitable DDR 3 ram; 4gb is likely ample for your needs but if you see others using the computer 2x4=8gb is a better choice so you have added flexibility for future upgrades. And a motherboard that supports Raid with at least 5 SATA ports is also a good idea, and the biggest case possible with lots of room for further hard disks.