PC setup

[I @ M]

I can tell you from personal experience that running Windows 7 64bit on 8GB of RAM will give you grief.

When I built my current system early last year I went with 8GB of RAM. It was OK till I started doing stuff like focus stacking and then it slowed down to a crawl.

I also had heaps of screen freezes and I eventually traced the problem to lack of RAM. Windows 7 64bit seems to use about 4GB of RAM even when just idling.

Since I have been using 16GB of RAM ( G.Skill Ripjaws 2 x 8GB @ 1333MHz ) I have not had a single problem.

Kev, I would blame the editing programs in use for a lot of the probs before laying the OS and PC entirely at fault.

Win 7 64 bit with 8gb ram and Nikon Capture NX2 hardly even blink at 80 mb NEF files from the camera. Even the 260 mb TIFFS produced don't seem to phase it much.

[Cage]

Kev, I would blame the editing programs in use for a lot of the probs before laying the OS and PC entirely at fault.

Win 7 64 bit with 8gb ram and Nikon Capture NX2 hardly even blink at 80 mb NEF files from the camera. Even the 260 mb TIFFS produced don't seem to phase it much.

I hear what you're saying Andrew, but even without any editing programs open I was getting up to five or six screen freezes per day.

When I 'Googled' the problem I found a million other W7 64bit users having the same issue, MS Tech Support blamed every bit of hardware in my computer, the PSU and the RAM sticks being the most popular. I could run 'Memtest' in my sleep.

In almost every instance, Event Viewer made some mention of memory problems.

I downloaded a little freeware program called 'Core Temp' and had it permanently displayed on my desktop. If you're not familiar with it, it displays core usage and temp plus RAM usage. It didn't take long to discover that when I had a freeze, my RAM usage was off the scale.

Now I'm no computer guru, I just know enough to put my own systems together and configure them to run consistently, but the constant issue with memory usage seemed to indicate that my problem lay in that area.

I dunno, maybe I've got a dodgy memory controller, but from the day I increased the amount of RAM I haven't had a hiccup.

Cheers

Kevin

[I @ M]

Now I'm no computer guru, I just know enough to put my own systems together and configure them to run consistently, but the constant issue with memory usage seemed to indicate that my problem lay in that area.

I'm no guru either ( more of a total Luddite actually when it comes to PCs ) and I couldn't put one together to save my life but maybe just maybe seeing as I have zero problems with the configuration that is similar to yours that gave problems there is some truth in the part that you may have had faulty ram, incompatible parts or software.