Jewelry Pics Made Wanda Wimpy

In my 3 short years as a jewelry artisan, how could I possibly take enough jewelry pictures to bring my computer to its knees? But I did! After all, my favorite geeky toy arrived in 2005 with the latest 74 gig harddrive- I was sooo proud of that:) In 2006 I started shooting away at my first jewelry creations... probably 5-10 RAW images for each handmade item, never dreaming how quickly those large files would eat up my C drive. But things were still humming along fine... until about 6 months ago. Over time, everything I wanted to do began taking forever, from opening Internet Explorer to check email to working in Photoshop Elements. Occasionally Windows complained that "my virtual memory was too low." Windows' auto-adjustment would help for a few days. But how much value was my high-speed, high-priced DSL connection if my computer could barely limp along?

I plan to buy a much beefier computer later this year, but I needed a bandaid in the meantime. By today there was very little storage left on the C drive, & computer performance was beyond intolerable. UGH! So I moved all 50 gigs of jewelry pictures (YES, 50 GIGS!) for my little business onto Tarzan, my name for the external drive I bought a year ago at Costco simply to store backup copies of our files, emails, favorites, outlook calendar, & contacts. With its 465 gigs of storage, Western Digital's "iBook" was a bargain.

The Copy/Paste of my 50 gigs from Wimpy Wanda to Tarzan took 2 hours 15 minutes! BUT my computer is once again humming along. Tarzan is so cool:)