Taking a cue from Shawn Blanc’s excellent website, here’s a brief write-up on my current computing setup.
In my studio I use an early 2008 model Mac Pro tower with 10GB of RAM and a dual monitor setup (30″ Samsung 305T and 19″ Hanns-G), where the Samsung is my main display for work and the Hanns G keeps my e-mail, Twitter, iTunes, and other ancillary applications running. This is the machine I use to make comics and illustrations.
I have a Wacom Intuos 4 wired tablet (6×9) which I adore to pieces. My work is now 100% digital so a tablet’s essential for what I do. (You can see it tucked away to the right of my Mac Pro on the second photo.)
My other machine is a 15″ 2008 model Macbook Pro, outfitted with 4GB of RAM. This is the machine I use primarily for academics. It doubles as a portable drawing studio on those rare occasions when I travel.
Other input devices I use regularly include:
- Blu Snowball mic (excellent quality microphone for recording podcasts and making Skype calls)
- Kensington Orbit trackball (once you go trackball, the ordinary mouse feels sedate)
- Sony MDR-7506 headphones (great audio and well worn-in after years of use)
- Canon 4400F flatbed scanner
- Apple wired (small) keyboard (the best portable keyboard I’ve ever used)
For storage, I have all 4 drive bays of the Mac Pro filled. Whenever its time for me to upgrade the OS on my computer, I purchase a new hard drive. The older hard drives are kept intact as redundant emergency back-ups. One of my drives has Windows 7 Home Premium installed on it, which I boot into occasionally when I need to use Autodesk’s Maya. In addition to that I have an OWC Mercury Elite Pro for maintaining video footage and older data that I need to work with and access from time to time. SuperDuper and Time Machine are both used for my local data back-ups, while Backblaze is used for off-site back-ups.I use a Maxtor OneTouch 4 USB external drive to back up the Macbook Pro at regular intervals.
Why do I use this setup?
The Mac Pro is a blazing fast machine for the work that I do – it’s probably overkill, but I work with large image files on a regular basis, and having the extra RAM headroom and speed is nice. The expandability of the Mac Pro is something that I consider to be important as I use my production machines for a full 5 years before considering an upgrade.
Next blog post: Software I use on a daily basis.
-Krishna
I “only” have 4GB of RAM, and I’ve been thinking about getting more. Do you think that’d be a good idea? (and you know that I have a bit of performance problems, when working on big files, AND I have a lot of things running at once. You think, say, 2-4 GB more would be a good investment?)
I think more RAM is always a good investment – if you’re running a 64-bit version of Windows it will be able to address more than 4GB of RAM. (32-bit OS’s can only address up to 4GB max). Windows 7 is 64-bit I believe. More info: http://www.w7forums.com/windows-7-64-bit-vs-32-bit-t484.html
Yeah, I’m running Windows 7 Professional 64bit, so that shouldn’t be a problem.
I’m surprised to read that you only work digital know. So, I’m pretty much looking out for your “Next blog post: Software I use on a daily basis.” ;)
Posted! :)