I have really lashed out and bought an Intel i7 920 with 12GB of RAM. So far ImagesPlus 64 bit and Registar 32 bit run flawlessly. PhotoShop 32 bit runs fine as well. Last friday took delivery of a 27" monitor.
Set everything up on the desk with old and new machines. I still have to migrate or install many more programs. I am sure there will be incompatibilities with Vista 64 bit. It refuses to play with my Canon camera software.
Below is a picture of my desk. That is a 19" monitor on the left. The 14" b&w monitor is connected to four IR security cameras. When collecting data I have a real time view through my finder with a GstarEX camera and a view of what the mount is doing.
The new computer has cut processing time down by a factor of four. It will be even more when I get used to the fact it can handle everything I can throw at it.
Congratulations on the new 'baby'. Almost as good looking as your grand-daughter Bert. 12GB of RAM - sheesh it'll be fast alright. Enjoy the new monitor too.
Kerrie
ps I think Canon have downloadable patches and drivers to facilitate compatability with 64bit Vista.
Last edited by BerrieK; 29-06-2009 at 10:30 PM.
Reason: ps
Thanks BerrieK for the info and I hate to say this but I sent my daughter and new grand daughter enough to get a 30" monitor. I am sure they will use it far better than myself.
Jase the CCTV through the finder tells me if cloud has lost the guiding. The IR emissions from the LED's are at a longer wavelength than the IR limit on the imaging camera and do not cause any problems.
Mike I started smoking in 1962 and it just goes to show all these doctors are wrong! I happen to be lucky enough to have hybrid vigour (mongrel). I am sure I would have reached a far older age without all my bad habits but then who wants a tetotaller reformed smoker as their best friend in the retirement village. I am aiming for all my organs to fail near to my death so no one is tempted to use them for a transplant. Currently it is a balance between liver lungs and heart. The heart is winning!
Very nice new PC and nice setup with the two screens Bert I'm not doing much astronomy at the moment and one part of the reason is my observatory PC (2.4ghz P4, 1gb RAM) is so slow it makes controlling the observatory painful. Hoping to upgrade when funds permit it doesn't help that at work I'm using a nice quad core
Bert, I have Vista 64 bit and Canon's DPP etc run perfectly. I've found it's wise not to install anything without running the setup by right clicking and selecting "run as administrator". You'd think that having admin priviledges on your user account would suffice, but this doesn't seem to be the case. I have found that running the same setup on the same machine (a reinstall on a crashed machine) resulted in a non working app on the machine that was run without the "run as administrator" option.
Last edited by acropolite; 04-07-2009 at 08:38 PM.
Mike I started smoking in 1962 and it just goes to show all these doctors are wrong! I happen to be lucky enough to have hybrid vigour (mongrel). I am sure I would have reached a far older age without all my bad habits but then who wants a tetotaller reformed smoker as their best friend in the retirement village. I am aiming for all my organs to fail near to my death so no one is tempted to use them for a transplant. Currently it is a balance between liver lungs and heart. The heart is winning!
Bert
From my research, smokers, and ex smokers who smoked for a long time, and are male, and in their early 70s, have a very high chance of Stomach cancer. It's one of the worst cancers, as it usually doesn't present itself until it's spread and chemo is not really an option.
I'm watching my dad go through his final months with stomach cancer.
There is an easy solution to smoking - legislatively force the cigarette companies to use ONLY natural tobacco, not genetically modified tobacco plants. Make them legislatively unable to add ANY chemicals to the cigarettes - straight tobacco, NOTHING else. And then raise the price of them by tenfold.
It's a disgustingly vulgar habit.
Other than those comments, glad the new PC setup is nice - you've got a great setup there and it's no surprise to me at how fast the machine is
Thanks for your concern and advice Dave. I have smoked only RYO tobacco since 1968 which is chemical free. Unfortunately I started smoking before all the dangers were known. The same mob that are denying AGW (Global Warming) used the same tactics to prevent any health warnings and any controls on tobacco marketing.
What the tobacco companies fear most is no new customers as the old customers are disappearing fast.
Anyone who takes up smoking now is a bigger fool than me. I have always agreed with younger relatives that smoking is bad for you health. None of my 34 nieces or nephews smoke.
I will generally not smoke anywhere but at home or out in the open. Obviously never near young children. When you are a few months from 60 your own mortality looms ever larger. Facing the reality is the first step to healthier living. I am more worried about losing my marbles.
That's OK Bert. I too smoked for a ten year period (girl I liked got me onto the habit as we were hanging out). Both of my fellow IT colleagues smoke, both have tried to give up with the fancy new patches and both have failed. I have to laugh, you have to *really* want to give up smoking. Fancy patches are just BS and money grabbers imho.
Males are more susceptible to stomach cancer apparently, and it seems to hit in the early 70s as well, which is statistically interesting. Why the 70s I wonder?
My father spend 2 months not being able to eat properly before the medical system decided to believe him and do something. He went in in December for a endoscopy, which failed as they lost him on the table and they had to abort the procedure (falling blood pressure dropped to 0, which meant the heart stopped). They thankfully revived him after 3 or so minutes of efforts but were very cautious about any procedure involving anaesthetics. They eventually did a 2nd endoscopy six weeks later and gave him the all clear and sent him home, although they noted a blockage in the stomach. A month later he was back in, and after an extended period of time in hospital they decided to operate. Operation was deemed a success, and no sign of cancer found. A week later he was moved back into ICU with complications, and they did an emergency operation on him again, which fixed problems with the first operation and also found cancer. Earlier blood tests found nothing, but blood tests and samples found at this stage revealed aggressive cancer, which had already spread to 2 lymph nodes. As my dad was down to 44kg (from 68kg 5 months earlier), they deemed chemo was not an option unless he put on 12kg in like 2 weeks, which wasn't ever going to happen. They removed his entire stomach btw. Chemo was only going to lengthen how much time he has left, not cure the cancer. He's been home for 3 months now, is happy enough, but the problems with retaining food are now returning and he is having to increase the strength of Oxycontin to help with the increasing pain.
It's not a pretty thing to watch someone go through. As an aside, my dad has major issues with his heart and lungs - both smoking related. Heart - double and then a triple bypass later. Lungs, operate at around 35% of normal capacity for someone of his age and are getting worse.
All of this to smoking. The government is doing bugger all about it, because it wants the taxes that it reaps. Again, like with Global Warming, businesses and governments are putting money ahead of the people's wellbeing. It's further proof to me why business should have NO influence whatsoever on governments. None. Nada. Businesses do not have the right to vote and should never have any influence on governments at all. And even then, rich individuals who own businesses should be barred from any governmental influence/intervention. They simply cannot be trusted to be acting in the best influence of the community, but only their own greedy selves.
Bert, something you might not know... on my 4-core machine registax always runs on core 0, I don't know why but something about it means it's never scheduled onto any of the other cores.
So if you run 2 or more copies at the same time then they all fight for time on one core while the other cores sit idle. Not Very Good.
You can override this manually after starting each copy of registax (on winxp use ctrl-alt-del to bring up the processes list, then right-click on registax and set the affinity so each copy runs on a different core).
I've emailed the author (Cor) but he has no idea why this happens...
Andrew with four cores and 12GB of RAM I would rather have total reliabilty. I am testing the system bog standard and at idle the CPU is 9C above ambient. Running prime95 on all eight hcores the CPU is at 30C above ambient. The really good thing is that even 32 bit programs that used to hog all the available memory to 3.6MB now only get allocated the same memory and there is enough for about four of these memory hungry programs to run concurrently.
The 64bit version of ImagesPlus will handle anything you can throw at it.
64 bit is really nice. I still feel that Microsoft should have dropped the 32 bit version of Vista and only released 64 bit. There's enough backwards compatibility for it to be workable. Drivers might have been a bid dodgey for the first Six months whilst hardware manufacturers pulled the finger out of their you know whats, but that's their problem, not Microsoft's.
Poor Microsoft has copped a hiding from the computing media about Vista and almost none of it was warranted. It's one of the reasons why I've stopped reading computer magazines - they're incredibly biased and usually full of ****.
Sounds damn well good. I have to say that my quadcore system experiences reflect what you're saying - amazing for image and multimedia workstations. If memory serves me correct, Intel is going to be releasing 8 core CPUs as well and I think the new chipsets will support up to 32GB system ram too. Beyond what the average person really needs, even when pushing, but it does give some future proofing I guess.
Personally I'd love a GPGPU (general purpose, Graphics Processing Unit) version of CS4 that moved the majority of the image processing load from the CPU onto the GPU. With several hundred hardware shaders and far more memory bandwidth - you'd get at least a ten fold raw performance boost (minimum) if you could properly encode the algorithms to use a modern GPU.
Anyone seen the video of the 4 guys in Germany that built a 4 GPU super computer to do 3D X-ray tomography in "realtime" by harnessing the power of modern graphics cards. Operations that took 8 CPUs 90 seconds were done in under 2 seconds by using the grunt of 4 SLI'd NVidia cards. Freakly fast!
I'm not doing much astronomy at the moment and one part of the reason is my observatory PC (2.4ghz P4, 1gb RAM) is so slow it makes controlling the observatory painful. Hoping to upgrade when funds permit 
it doesn't help that at work I'm using a nice quad core 
