I work in IT and am a bit of a geek so I appreciate technology. More than that, I appreciate what technology can do for me and allows me to do. Photography is one of those things that having a reasonable computer definately improves the user experience.
My old computer is an AMD 3800 single core machine built to custom spec for me about 6 years ago. I got single core at the time because the clockspeed on the dual cores was less than that of the single core, and at the time I wasn’t using any software that would properly utilise the dual core setup. Fast forward 3 years and I am starting to get serious with my P&S to the stage I am seriously looking at upgrading to a DSLR. Skip forward another year and that happens and I also get Lightroom shortly afterwards. And my computer just cannot cut the mustard, its too slow to deal with large quantities of large image files.
I export all my images as JPG with the long side measuring 1500 pixels at 200 dpi resolution. On my old computer it took about an hour to export 50 images.
I have just done an export of 43 images at 1200 pixels longside (downscaling so it fits better where I need to use them) at 200dpi. IT TOOK ABOUT 2 MINUTES!!!!
And I imported about 300 images in about 15 minutes, and that would have taken over half an hour on my old computer and then that again to import the previews.
Yes you could say I am quite pleased about this, I got it a week ago, and spent the weekend setting it up and reinstalling software ETC but hadn’t had a chance to properly put it through its paces. So I am stoked as we say in this part of the world 🙂 After getting my camera, finances were short, so its taken this long for me to get funds together. This is the most power, with the max amt of memory and the required amt of storage I could afford, and this computer is expected to last at least 4-5 years until I can afford to replace it.
Oh, you want to know the tech specs? Alrighty then…
ATX Chenbro case
650W Extreme Power Plus power supply
Asus P6X58D-E mobo
Intel Core i7 950 3.06Ghz CPU
3 x 4GB memory (12GB in total)
Asus ENGTX250/2DVI/512 graphics card
4 x Seagate 500GB hard drives in two RAID 1 arrays (one for C: the other one is D: and solely for image files)
Built in Card reader
DVD RW
Win 7 Home Prem 64bit
3 yr warranty
Learning to See Light 
Hell yeah! Nice rig. I used to build desktops for myself until my most recent when I opted to go Mac. I can’t say I was overly impressed, but I do like it very much. I suppose I wasn’t as wowed as I expected because having built my own desktops they were much better than store bought ones.
Hard to believe one can get a quad-core chip running at 3.06GHz, isn’t it?