Bought a new PC, oh how I forgot thine pleasures my dear....

[sgreger1]

Hey here's another slightly-tech question that maybe some of the designer pro's around here could answer. I have a Take-out Menu for my wife's mother's restarurant that I made Adobe in-design and want to get a bunch of them printed. Do you think it's best to go to kinkos or something or are there web services that you are aware of that do it better/cheaper? I have never mass printed anything so am not sure if Kinkos is good for that sort of thing or not.

[shikitohno]

Not familiar with Adobe in-design, but I imagine I've got the basic idea. I'd say it depends on a number of things. First, there's your dimensions for the menu. Are you just doing a few sheets of 8.5"x11" paper stapled together, one oversized sheet like Chinese restaurants do, or a wide sheet folded over a few times? If it's anything you could do with your current printer (or a reasonably cheap one), I'd say screw Kinko's and do it yourself. Grab a few reams of glossy paper, a couple cartridges of some decent ink, and spend the money learning how to do it yourself instead of having some half-trained teenager punch buttons after loading your document on the system there.

[lxskllr]

Not familiar with Adobe in-design, but I imagine I've got the basic idea. I'd say it depends on a number of things. First, there's your dimensions for the menu. Are you just doing a few sheets of 8.5"x11" paper stapled together, one oversized sheet like Chinese restaurants do, or a wide sheet folded over a few times? If it's anything you could do with your current printer (or a reasonably cheap one), I'd say screw Kinko's and do it yourself. Grab a few reams of glossy paper, a couple cartridges of some decent ink, and spend the money learning how to do it yourself instead of having some half-trained teenager punch buttons after loading your document on the system there.

Would that be cost effective with a inkjet? Thy rape you on ink prices. Also, there can be issues with bleeding. I do prefer the DIY approach though. Laser printers can be had at a decent price these days, and as long as you aren't doing photos, you can do a professional job with one.

[sgreger1]

Hey Shiki, you know your suggestion about using the original 1.5tb drive as the OS drive and then the second HDD as the one for data etc, does that make the computer run faster? I always hear people recommend this but I am not sure why it is advantageous to run the OS+programs on one drive and store your documents/media on the other. Does having a bunch of free space on the OS drive really serve any benefit? I know that packing it up to the max slows it down but am wondering if there is any benefit to leaving like a terrabyte of free space on it and just dumping everything on the second drive?

[Ainkor]

Hey here's another slightly-tech question that maybe some of the designer pro's around here could answer. I have a Take-out Menu for my wife's mother's restarurant that I made Adobe in-design and want to get a bunch of them printed. Do you think it's best to go to kinkos or something or are there web services that you are aware of that do it better/cheaper? I have never mass printed anything so am not sure if Kinkos is good for that sort of thing or not.

I'm a big fan of sticking with what you know. It's always a good idea to get to know the other local businesses. Also, I'm a fan of bartering. I assume your food is good, why not work out a deal and trade some free food for either a discount or for the printing? You only pay 30-40% of the gross as do they. Works out in both of your favor

[lxskllr]

Hey Shiki, you know your suggestion about using the original 1.5tb drive as the OS drive and then the second HDD as the one for data etc, does that make the computer run faster? I always hear people recommend this but I am not sure why it is advantageous to run the OS+programs on one drive and store your documents/media on the other. Does having a bunch of free space on the OS drive really serve any benefit? I know that packing it up to the max slows it down but am wondering if there is any benefit to leaving like a terrabyte of free space on it and just dumping everything on the second drive?

I like 20%+ free space on my drives. I don't see much point in separating your programs from your O/S. Most write crap all over your drive, so it won't work reinstalling your O/S, and trying to run them from a different drive. Keeping data separate makes sense. That makes it easier to reinstall without backing a bunch of stuff up fist.

[sgreger1]

Would that be cost effective with a inkjet? Thy rape you on ink prices. Also, there can be issues with bleeding. I do prefer the DIY approach though. Laser printers can be had at a decent price these days, and as long as you aren't doing photos, you can do a professional job with one.

Yah this was sort of my issue. One one hand making a bunch of photocopied cheap b&w menus is probably cheaper to just do myself, but if I wanted to make actual high quality ones on glossy paper (like wha they have at subway etc), I am wondering if it would be cost effective considering the price of colored ink these days. I suppose I will have to stop by and see what the scam artists at kinkos will charge first to find out.

[sgreger1]

I like 20%+ free space on my drives. I don't see much point in separating your programs from your O/S. Most write crap all over your drive, so it won't work reinstalling your O/S, and trying to run them from a different drive. Keeping data separate makes sense. That makes it easier to reinstall without backing a bunch of stuff up fist.

Yah I get the convenience angle, but was just wondering if there was any real performance to be gained. Right now I am keeping my OS and programs on one drive and moving all of my data to the other drive. I am then using Norton ghost to back up the same data from the first two drives on a third drive in a compressed disc image. Hopefully this means I won't lose all my shit someday if something crashes. I guess if I wanted to be really sexy I could set up a RAID array with mirrors so that if any of the drives fail I can still access 100% of the data on the others but it's just a question of how much money I want to blow on backing my shit up lol. I've already spent about $300 on hard drives this month so I think I am good for now.


Also I just wanted to say that you guys are a great help. I know it must be annoying with me asking so many questions but as a human that is how I learn. I do my best to google shit before posting it but sometime my Google-Fu is not as strong as it should be.

[lxskllr]

From an artistic POV, I'm not a fan of glossy paper. It can look especially cheap if the graphic design isn't up to snuff, and I've seen pretty bad jobs from people who were supposed to be pros. I like a nice monochrome design, or maybe just a touch of color done on plain paper. It isn't as flashy, but it's easier making a classy design for a non-pro.

[lxskllr]

There /may/ be a somewhat linear performance penalty as the drive fills, but I never noticed anything bad until it got below ~20%. The cutoff is somewhere between 15%-20%, so I use the figure 20% for a little headroom.

[shikitohno]

Hey Shiki, you know your suggestion about using the original 1.5tb drive as the OS drive and then the second HDD as the one for data etc, does that make the computer run faster? I always hear people recommend this but I am not sure why it is advantageous to run the OS+programs on one drive and store your documents/media on the other. Does having a bunch of free space on the OS drive really serve any benefit? I know that packing it up to the max slows it down but am wondering if there is any benefit to leaving like a terrabyte of free space on it and just dumping everything on the second drive?

It won't make it terribly faster, but it can help out things in the long run. The biggest advantage is, if your OS partition gets borked (You get some crazy virus, HDD fails, whatever), you still have all your other stuff nice and safe, waiting for you on drive #2. The other potential benefit I could think of would be distributing he read/write operations. Your programs would generally be reading/writing on the first drive pretty constantly, but the second drive would prety much get written once, and then only read off of, assuming you just filled it once and didn't delete things. I think the merits of reducing read/writes are probably questionable, though, considering you're not doing huge batch programs generating massive amounts of data every day, and you're not using and SSD.

[sgreger1]

Hey so I am having this problem with Firefox when I try to download a small file where it says "There is not sufficient memory to complete the action you requested. Close some applications and try again".

I am running at 13% processor speed, 4% of RAM. I have 3tb of memory on this disk too. Has anyone ever experienced this with firefox?

[shikitohno]

Memory in that context would be talking about ram. Don't know what in particular caused it. Perhaps you've got a plugin that's messing up your memory for Firefox.

[sgreger1]

But all other downloads work, it only happens on this one site (digitaltutors.com). I think the problem is that when I go to download it it says the file size is "-1bytes". Maybe the fact it think it's a negative value is messing it up? I don't know.

[shikitohno]

Yeah, negative values are no good. It's impossible to have a file of -1 bytes, it's like having a bottle of -1L of water. If it's only that one site, I'd be inclined to think that maybe they've misconfigured something on their site or something. I'd just try and find the file elsewhere, and if it works, I'd mark off that site as no good for the future. Maybe shoot them an email and ask about it to see if it's something they can fix, or if they could point you to what possible errors on your end might be.