In light of my recent events I'm sick to the teeth for now with couriers and have cancelled the return of the above and decided to give it a 2nd chance, I did a system restore on it the other night, and it worked ok, so I've got another 21 days to try it out anyway.
Can anyone tell me what NOT to do with a 64 bit PC? I've read that 32 bit software will maybe just run slower, so should be ok with the assumption I made before
You should be able to run 32bits software on a 64bit OS, however there are some times when it will not work. That mostly relates to driver issues the 32-bit program wants to use. Those problems are rare though.
The difference between 64 and 32 bit are almost exclusively the ability to address more memory. 32bit caps out at about 3,5gb, with drivers and such eating up some, and you usually end up with about 3gb RAM available to the programs. So if you have more the 3gb RAM in your system you should go for a 64bit OS, or you will be missing out on your RAM.
Running a 32bit program in a 64bit OS just limits the maximum amount of memory this application can use to ~3gb. I have looked at how much my Lightroom application uses, and it very rarely goes above 1gb. However, my catalog is about 700mb, and I'm not sure how this is cached. If the OS has available RAM it should use this for caching HD access, which in turn would speed up reading (and possible writing) to your HD. Then again, there is really nothing that should stop you from using the 64bit version if you do have a 64bit OS.
As for generating the image quick, I've found that there are several factors that affects this. I'm running on a machine with 12gig RAM, and a i7core 920 overclocked to 2.8GHz. If I compare this with my notebook, which have a slightly slower HD (7200 vs 5400), only 4gig RAM, but a measly 1.6Ghz CLUV processor. The netbook takes almost 30 seconds to render a 5dmkII rawfile when opening to anything except the preview. This takes less then a second on my i7 machine.
There is also the setting to adjust how much HD-space you want to use for caching camera-raw data (not sure if this is only used during final rendering or not). And a setting for how long to keep the preview before it being discarded.
Graphic card only affects the LR performance when doing localized editing. If you don't do that, then it would not make any difference if you have a whizbang 3D superexpensive card or a $50 one.
Looking at your spec, I would guess a SSD HD with the OS and the database/catalog on, and a normal for storing the disc. From my own experience, I dont think adding more RAM would help you much right now, but getting a faster processor (i5 or i7 would be my recomendation) might speed up your first initial preview.
One thing you could do, if your running Windows7 (guessing since new computer and 64bit OS). Fire up the task manager, and then in the 3:rd tab click on Performace monitor (running swedish Vista right now, might be called something else ). Or simply run perfmon.exe . With this util you can see CPU utlization, memory consumtion, HD access and network access. Fire up this program, then you can easily see if its the CPU that spikes and goes to 100% when you open Lightroom and see the "slowness", or if its HD access thats the bottleneck (you can see in % how much of the HD bandwith is used, and how many read/writes are queued up).
Best of luck!
/Björn
Too bad those drives are still so expensive.
