New Computer

Well, Sheri and I bit the bullet and sprang for a new laptop to replace the two year old low budget, absolutely not upgradable (big, HUGE purchasing mistake) laptop. That thing just could not reasonably run LightRoom and Photoshop, grinding to a halt on a my first relatively big HDR processing job (a simple HDR panorama of the Oklahoma City National Memorial I quickly shot but planned badly). It was also starting to crash daily and generally slow for a W7 machine with 8gigs of RAM (ran MS Office just fine though).

That's a 24 total shot panorama where the average individual file size is 73megs in PSD format. The final 3 pano images merged to make the HDR average 587megs (again, in PSD format). I made the picture as follows:

1. Shot right to left. 
2. Three shots at each pan, one shot at metered exposure (0EV), one shot -2 and one shot +2
3. Eight panned shots were maken, each one overlapping the last.
4. Merged the eight shots made at 0EV into one pano and saved as a PSD.
5. Merged the eight shots made at -2EV into one pano and saved as a PSD.
6. Merged the eight shots made at +2EV into one pano and saved as a PSD.
7. Merged the three PSD panos to an HDR using NIK HDR EFEX Pro 2.

The response from the old laptop was the dreaded "blue screen of death."

So we bought an ASUS GS750JW that had 8gigs of RAM and had 8 more gigs of RAM added to it.

It.

Screams.

The ASUS took all of 5 minutes to process the HDR. 

Anyways...I've got close to 400gigs of data to transfer plus the programs and such so I thought I'd try one of those software/hardware packages with the dedicated Ethernet connection that does all of this for you. Spent the $50 on that, started it at about 7pm at night, and when I woke up at 5am the next morning, a whopping 16gigs had transferred. 10 hours, 16gigs = 1.6gig/hr. Not an ideal situation, doing that math it's going to take another 10 days to get it all moved.

I had thought about pulling the hard drive from the old laptop and sticking it in the open drive bay of the ASUS, but instead I found a little use 1TB portable drive and all of the old software disks.

After killing and rolling back the data transfer, I started loading and updating software while the portable drive ground away. I was done in less than 8 hours...