I was hoping to have the Dragon*Con Friday photos up by now, but for two reasons they’re not done yet:

1. Friday was by far the biggest day for photos, so it’s taking longer than I expected
2. I spent a large part of the weekend migrating to a new computer that I assembled myself.

My previous system was a 4-year-old WinXP dual-core AMD system that was really showing its age. The new system is much spiffier:

• Intel Core i7-860 quad-core hyperthreaded processor
• 8GB RAM
• 160GB SSD for the OS
• 1TB high-speed SATA drive for data
• Blu-ray optical drive
• Radeon 5870 graphics card
• 750W power supply
• Intel DP55SB motherboard
• Antec Mini P180 case
• Windows 7 Ultimate x64

Not surprisingly, the new system is very fast. Operations that took a second or two on the old system are now instananeous. Launching Photoshop CS4 used to be slow enough to grab a coffee; now it takes 3 seconds. This massive speed increase is making a big difference in my ability to edit photos (and Caroline’s ability to select photos) efficiently, so I’m hoping I will be able to get photos out quicker in the future. (When you’re going through 1000 photos, even one or two seconds per photo saved adds up quickly.)