Photoshop on a PC -- what's the best?

Question

Okay, so, my mom said she would get me Photoshop on our desktop at home.  The deal is, I want a Mac because I know it works well and runs efficiently, however, my mother has been working on a PC for 30 years, so changing over to a Mac desktop for her, would be like a moving to a foreign country. From what I've read online, I've picked up the vibe that you pretty much have to build a PC from the inside out to make this thing work right. So, what I need to know, is what needs to be built, there is no budget.  Oh, and the only Photoshop on there will probably be CS5.  Since this computer will only be in use with me for about 15 months because she's going to have to buy a Mac anyways when I go off to college, she's just refusing to listen right now and is probably dead set on getting a new desktop.  So I really have no idea what it takes to make this run right, but it HAS to run good. 
Thanks for all the help
Kayde

Answer 1

I'm actually only 16, I'm a high school junior and have been working with Photoshop since I was about 13.  We currently have a rather large PC it's only about four years old, and I have Photoshop Elements 7 and it freezes ALL the time!  Then at school, I work on a Mac Desktop and we have CS3. So I actually want to go to school for Graphic Design or Photo Editing (depends on the school I end up at).   However, I'm in the Photography program at my high school, and well, it's really just a bad situation and I have done the class three years in a row, but this is my last year with it, which explains the new need for Photoshop at home.
Having Photoshop on this "new computer" is really only a hold over for about 18 months, because I graduate high school in May of 2012 and I'll be receiving a Mac Book Pro with all the Photoshops for graduation.   So, which is why my mom really wants to make this work on a PC because come August of 2012 this "new computer" will pretty much have no use for me.
I have absolutely no clue what TIFF, RAW and 16-bits are!  So I will definitely have to look those up.  But you have by far given us the most help!  Thank you so much!
This may be of some help in addressing the issues you're having with PSE7 and the PC you have now....
PS Elements is a 32bit program...
PSE7 uses only 50% of available ram (half of 1602mb, that is, HALF OF HALF of 3.5gb limit 32bit OS reserves for programs OTHER than the operating system....)
I know this because I have PS7 and had used it in my old P4/2.5gb Ram in XP-32bit before upgrading this month to the i7-860/6gb and Win7-64bit
...so now that I'm using Win7 64bit with 6gb RAM...in PSE7 I can now move the memory use slider (in Performance, see Preferences under the Edit tab at the top task bar) from 50% to 100% and use all 1602mb, far less than is actually available...
With all 1.6gb now running PSE7 there is no problem running PSE7...
btw...also create and assign a scratch partition that will not be used for saving any data...this will also help performance...though with more than 4gb in the system, it is unlikely the scratch disk 'memory' will be needed much, especially for casual PSE use.
Now, as for how well a new machine will run Photoshop....compared to an older machine...
....I use PS6, an older version, and I use Canon Digital Photo Professional (DPP) to open RAW images and convert them to Jpegs...(PSE7 will do this but I find DPP simple to use as it has
a large thumb nails to review)...RAW is the UNadulterated/UNprocessed data (hence "RAW" as in "RAW data") that give you much more control over the image processing, including
adjusting color temperatue (daylight vs cloudy vs shade vs tungston vs flourescent, etc)....
I know some people will say that this simple example is not so simple...but...to help you a bit with TIFF/Jpeg/RAW terminology....Jpeg is a compressed file, with loss of detail as a result...TIFF is a "lossless" file good for printing, but it is not accepted on the internet....so we use JPEGs which is the standard for posting photos on the 'net....
It used to take 18 seconds to convert/save a 40D Raw file (from DPP...a 13mb file that has not been processed there) to default Jpeg in my old P4/3.2-HT cpu with 2.5gb Ram....a machine that may be similar to yours....
Now it takes 3-4 seconds to do the same in my new i7-860/6gb Ram machine....with Win7-64bit OS...
I can't say whether this is much faster than an i3 or i5 machine...but I got a good price on the i7 so I went for it...
...nor can I say if this is much slower than an i7-900 series....and really I don't care if it is...as you can see, a fraction of second faster vs. the improved 15 seconds is hardly a concern...
I hope that gives you SOME idea of the order of improvement I experienced....and as has been suggested, an i7 with at least 6gb of RAM will take care of most of your needs I'm sure.
Good luck...and happy new year everyone....