OHT Adoption Update

Just wanted to give everyone a quick update on the section of trail that we adopted back in September. There has been a little confusion on the adoption of the section of trail we requested (#44 - Falling Water Creek to Richland Creek campground), but Roy Senyard has indicated that we will be the ones officially adopting the section, rather than Arkansas Geocachers as is indicated on the website now.

There is a trail crew going to the slide area this coming Sat. led by Bobby Raney. Roy plans to join him, and was there this past Sat. (recon-look) and says it will take more than one trip to complete the re-route.

I have a slide program next week to prepare for, and a crashed computer to rebuild, but am going to try to meet Roy and Bobby on Saturday. If anybody else can shake loose, I'm sure they could use the help. Just let me know and I will pass the info onto Roy.

FYI, Best Buy currently has a great deal on a Dell Studio XPS desktop box for $1019. Has an Intel i7 processor, 1 TB HDD, Windows 7 64-bit OS, 8 GB DDR3 RAM, and GeForce GTS240 graphics card. I continiue to be amazed at how far prices have declined on computers, just in the last few months.

William,

Those prices for Dell stuff is really impressive. I had a Dell for a long time and had no problem except the RAM could not be upgraded by much, and at great expense. So I'm not saying that DELL is not doing a good job, OK.

But, I had my son build me a desktop 4 months ago with essentially the same stuff you mentioned. It was about $50 more than this. Of course it might be less now.

But, upgradability, according to my son, especially for photography might be an issue.

He stated that Dell will include a minimum power supply to run just this stuff and a simple mother board. Adding peripheral hard drives, etc. could mean changing power supplies. Same goes with drivers. And, with RAM being more important all the time I can go up to 16 gigs of ram in the future. I don't know what the DELL will do.

He also mentioned "bios" upgrade. Some mother boards are not made with this feature. I superficially understand that some programs require upgrades in bios.

So, from someone "who does not know" from a source I cannot go against (grins), I would put this out for those who can respond with knowledge, pro or con.

Caveat emptor--buyer beware.

the fisch

I just can't get over the fact that Apple's operating system uses less than 1/2 of a percent of processing power on my Mac Pro when idle, and you never have to worry about viruses, spyware or pressing control-alt-delete!

8 Processor Cores, 4 internal hard drives in RAID 0, up to 32GB of ram....

They can also run Windows 7 natively :)

Aaron, how much does a mac like that cost?

Bill, the system that Aaron is referring to starts at $3299 and goes up from there, not including a monitor. There is not much discounting, maybe 5% if you deal with the apple store business unit.

Here is a link :http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/mac_pro?mco=MTAyNTQwMTk

Thanks Tom. If I'm not mistaken, a system similar to the one Aaron described would run about $8300. Pretty pricey, but I'm sure it would be a dream machine to operate. Still, I'm very pleased with the deal I got. It will be quite an improvement over 32-bit OS, Pentium D and 2 GB of memory, and should handle a D3x file with ease.

Here's the link to the OHT website referenced above: http://ozarkhighlandstrail.com/Maintenance/tabid/485/Default.aspx.

Bill I am still having some back pain and trying to be careful. I won't be doing any trail work right now.

No problem, Gale, you need to take it easy. Hope you get to feeling better soon.

Sounds like a great deal, Bill!

I built a Photoshop PC last spring - 8-core, 12GB memory (24GB max), RAID0 scratch drive, Vista64, Photoshop-compatible graphics card (CS4 can take advantage of the GPU) plus monitor for about $3000 (slightly more than a similarly equipped Dell would have cost). I'm sure the prices have come down since then. The only reason I built was OEM OS vs a fully licensed copy, and I liked having the choice of components.

Tim, in my haste to replace my old computer (XP Pro OS), I am finding that I probably need to do a little more research on some compatibility issues like Windows 7 64-bit/CS3/video card, and being able to run several apps that I still need to find out about. An upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate will be necessary so that I can run in XP mode, which I hope will solve any compatibility issues. I'm hoping that I won't encounter any installation hang ups when I try to install CS3 or 4. Adobe doesn't seem to have any support for the problems people have encountered with Windows 7.

Bill, I never buy any RAM or Hard Drives from Apple because they are 200%-500% more! I found my Mac Pro on BandH for around $2700.00 and decked it out with 10GB ram and 4 1tb drives for around $3600.00 (apple would have charged at least $5000.00 for all that).

I'm dying for CS5 to utilize the power of the mac because as of now mac's can only utilize 3GB of RAM for Photoshop...

Tim B., your computer sounds like a hoss and I'm sure Photoshop is FAST!

You have to be pretty savvy on on Windows to have a smooth sailing system...

I'm looking forward to solid state drives. Can you imagine 4 drives in RAID 0 ???

Aaron, that sounds a bit more in-line with what would be needed to run photoshop...I'd say you got a pretty good deal.

It will be interesting to see how SSDs develop. They're still pretty new and not entirely problem free. Of note is that Windows 7 is optimized for SSDs. Once the prices come down it will be fun to play around with them.