Computers and You - A Guide in Making Choices as P

I use an air compressor. I am not sure I would trade a more precise stream of air that I can hold a decent distance away for a leaf blower, but.... well, I guess it could work well. I just wouldn't choose that way.

thornburg wrote: keith_h wrote: At the risk of causing a lot of freaking out, I use a leaf blower to clean the dust out of my PC... I'm really, really hoping that this a joke...

I've done the same thing with really dusty old electronics - take 'em outside and go at it. For 'normal' cleaning, canned air has sufficed.

TheEmrys wrote: I use an air compressor. I am not sure I would trade a more precise stream of air that I can hold a decent distance away for a leaf blower, but.... well, I guess it could work well. I just wouldn't choose that way.

Some years back, I was working the tech side of a high-end workstation vendor. At one job-site visit (iirc, upgrading HD/vid/RAM on their primary design/CAM computer in the office beside the shop floor) I noted a LOT of dust/crud inside the box. I whipped out my can of compressed air, but -- no no! We wouldn't HEAR of you using such a feeble product! -- they took the un-cased unit out onto the machineshop floor and used their pneumatic powertool airsupply hose to blow the stuff loose... not sure, but I think that sucker was running something like 2000 psi...

TheEmrys wrote: Steve-S wrote: Thanks to all for a VERY useful thread! FYI: the September 2015 TR System Guide is up! Skylake is here (albeit in limited supply) and so is DDR4-2133 (and faster) memory... I just wish the TR SystemGuides weren't so relentlessly game-centric! The truth, though, is that photography requires very little in the way of gpu for photo editing. There is just so little advantage a hugely powerful gpu over a weak one. As long as the basic opencl work can done, its good. The difference is hardly noticeable, because it does highly specialized work, primarily in CS. But, for stressing a computer's gpu, cpu, and everything else, few things are as good as games.

It's really useful to know that a separate gpu card has little to offer the photoshop-using stills shooter! But yeah... high end games have long been one of the toughest, most-comprehensive challenges a computer had to face! Ages ago, in the era of ms-dos when "IBM-PC compatibility" was a thing under discussion, I recall my amusement upon learning that the official recommendation for most hardware vendors was "does it run FlightSimulator?"

After a couple of months of using a UHD/4k/3840x2160 tv/monitor via display port it would be hard to go back to lower resolution. Even at 42" I've got to get in to between two and three feet to see the detail. It's hard to imagine how close folks have to be to a smaller screen to see what detail there is at lower resolution.

Prices are way down, display was $299 and card $119. Time to take advantage of the efficiencies of standard mass market devices as they replace older lower resolution specialty screens between HD and UHD resolutions. There are only four mfrs of lcd panels in the world. Bells and whistles will vary some, but the underlying technology comes in 4 flavors.

Only real glitch so far was that I had to disable "desktop composition", it screwed up 4k sync (Win 7 - control panel, advanced system settings, advanced, performance, settings, visual fx).

Sure, if you zoom in you can see roughly as much detail at the same distance in 1/4 of the image. Conversely you can get roughly 4x the detail zoomed to 1/4 image on a 4k screen. More resolution is more resolution until we get finer then our eyeballs can discriminate, and it's all "retina displays" from there. Sort of like lenses and sensors.

Also, full screen of any size at UHD/8mp means 3 pixels of a 24mp sensor image are mapped to each (full) screen pixel, versus 12 on a 1080p screen. Seems like a nice step up, especially if it's cheaper.

Ain't technology wunnerful?

The size was what was available. What I was after was a dramatically improved display at low cost. That's what I got with the full image at high resolution at a decent viewing distance.

The intent of my first post was to follow up on chatter a couple of months ago with folks about whether 4k was worth doing. For what it's worth, the experience for me has been very good. YMMV.