One drawback is that you lose the bragging rights you’d otherwise get as the owner of a four-way, 32-core Intel Super-Extreme Unrestricted Limited Edition Hyper-Gateway, cooled using liquid nitrogen at 350bar, workstation. No, this article is about getting the most bang for your buck and sometimes – actually, quite often – that means looking at slightly older kit. That’s easy, just throw 5 grand at me a computer supplier, wait for them to stop giggling, and switch it on. This article isn’t about how to get the most screamingly fast computer that it’s possible to get.

Deciding what’s relevant is mostly what this article’s for. I might just be persuaded to say “go buy component X or Y and it will all get better, provided that component X or Y is relevant to the specific problem on your current computer“. What I’m not going to do is to tell you “go buy component X and Y and it will all get better”. I’m going to leave a lot of the nitty-gritty details for another article and just offer some general points here, but there should still be enough for you to start making real decisions. So, it’s either working on something or waiting for something. What actually makes it slow though? What’s it doing, or what’s it waiting for? Why doesn’t it just give you the results immediately when you tell it to do something? We need to know this, because otherwise you won’t be able to make an informed choice about your shiny new workstation and could well be throwing money at the wrong problem.

It’s always worth experimenting a little with some of the things mentioned in these articles first, because that’s a great deal cheaper than buying a new workstation unless you’re really pushed for time! There are several things which might be affecting Lightroom performance, and there are lots of posts out there already which describe tuning Lightroom. However, the same choices and limitations exist for both PC and Mac, the only real difference is in how you go about buying one. The reason for this focus is simply that PCs can be built to order from many companies, while Macs tend to be more restricted in the choices you can make. The rest of this guide is mostly focussed on Windows PCs, but is still worth a read if you plan to buy a Mac. They’re based on such similar hardware these days that the real choice is down to the operating system, and you’ll already know which one you prefer. Who cares? Really? Well, you do I assume, but other than that it’s entirely personal preference. No problem – but where do you start? There’s more choices than you can shake a stick at, including the big one: Mac or Windows? So Lightroom is slow and you want a better computer to speed things up for you.

Lightroom 6 best buy