Some of the article was quite good but other bits I believe are a a bit weak.
1) The article pushes XP over W2K because of organisational features but I would say most photographers will want better organisational programs so this benefit is useless. I believe you may prefer using XP and some drivers for stuff like SATA disk drives may be bettter supported in WXP however W2K runs adequately in less RAM than WXP.
2) Video Ram I don't believe there is any truth in more VRAM beyond the amount needed for your display(s) unless you are doing 3-d rendering which few photographers will get involved in unless they are playing games in their spare time. 16MB per display is probably perfectly good for all but multiple displays. For each screen multiply the resolution x and y * 3 and sum up the results - make sure you have more than this amount.
3) Disks and Raid.
I have tried raid-0 and found that sequential reads (avoid filling the disk up and defrag once in a while) gained very little from RAID on a fast modern IDE disk as they performed close to PCI saturation point. However writing to disk particularly uncompressed data (TIFF) gained lots. However if the amount being written could be accomodated in free RAM (ie cached) there was no gain.
I found much better gains for photo- editting by using multiple disks for different tasks. In particularly partitiion the front few GB (the fastest part of your fastest disk) and only use it for PS cache disk. This disk partitiion should maintain very fast sequential access at all times as it should always be empty when you are not using PS. Whilst working on your images do not store your images anywhere on the PS cache disk.
If you are using very large TIFF files (usually scanned medium format) or Video-editing then RAID-0 does still give a large write benefit otherwise splitting their usage is of more benefit.
Bizarrely in the article even the "cutting edge" setup suggested only has the single raid-0 array.
4) Memory. The suggested 4GB is of little use if photoshop can only use 2GB - although I understand PSCS2 can use more. I suggest you allow 256MB for WXP (128MB W2K)+ 128MB for PS + at least 3x and preferably 5-6x your largest normal multi-layered image. 1 layer of 6Mp 16 bit data = 36MB. Look at the size of uncompressed multi-layer images and multiply by 5-6x for comfort. Many will find 1GB is enough. If in doubt enable PS status bar and watch the progress bar if you notice it often dramatically slows and your disk light comes on you need more RAM.
5) If your a little short of memory and a little brave first try to optimise your windows setup.
a) Get rid of all unnecessary services see
http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm or
http://www.blackviper.com/WIN2K/servicecfg.htm as appropriate.
b) Disable all those annoying windows resident tasks (real player,quicktime,mouse configuration,office tool bar,windows indexing services,graphics card helpers...) - most of these are rarely used and can be accessed by other means when required. "Codestuff starter" is a particularly useful tool for test removal (permanent or temporary) of these.
http://www.answersthatwork.com have a list of tasks and whether you can or in some cases should stop them or not.
6) CPU wise I believe PS is slightly better optimised for Intel P4 but there's not a lot in it - I have an Athlon as it was much cheaper and works well. Be particularly wary of Celeron - I have not used a very modern one but everything from about 800MHz-1.7GHz were badly crippled by poor on-board cache performance.
I understand that if you're running intensive jobs such as big batch jobs and simultaneously checking your mail that hyper-threading will help.
Steve
