More RAM, yes, more processor speed, no. I'm running a blue & white G3 400 with a gig of RAM. Until a few months ago I was running with 512 megs of RAM, which was how I picked up the system nearly three years ago. Our bottleneck is now drive speed. I replaced our original 5200 rpm drive with a larger 7200 rpm one about a year ago, and that boosted Photoshop performance noticeably. Now that they've dropped in price, I'm thinking of adding a large FireWire external drive. I'll let you know if I do what the result is.
Anyhow, with the above system, I do not find the performance while scanning or tweaking large files to be sluggish until the file size goes above 750 megs (6x9 neg scan at 4000dpi with multiple layers). Since I am rarely in that situation, I am not considering an upgrade to my tower's processor at this time. Another thing to keep in mind is that with files that are bigger than 100 megs, you'll run out of scratch disk space in a hurry. I like to keep at least 5 gigs free for Photoshop's scratch disk. Without that much, performance really drops with big files. So, if I'm remembering my benchmarks right, your 733 machine should be faster than my G3 400. You're fine. 512 megs of RAM was good enough for me until I started making 4000dpi scans from medium format. Get some big, fast drives and have a good time. Does the scanner have a FireWire option? I don't know if it was because of scanner performance or because of FireWire vs. SCSI, but our old SCSI SprintScan 4000 scanned more slowly than our newer SprintScan 120. Both would be significantly faster than USB, which is relatively slow. If you're using the scanner through USB, that could be what is causing your long scan times. Have fun! -Aaron - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
