On Tue, 24 Feb 2009 14:15:28 -0800 (PST),
wrote:

Hi. I'm pretty much a novice starting out in astro imaging. I'm
waiting on delivery of my QSI 583 wsg and will be using MaxIm DL for
camera control, off-axis guiding and processing. I use Starry Night
Pro for telescope control and expect to use Photoshop for additional
processing. I would appreciate some advise on how to spec a computer
to cope well with running all this. Clearly reasonably fast with lots
of storage and good graphics processing will be helpful. I've read
somewhere about a suggestion of using two screens to run different
tasks but the chap building the computer indicates this may be a bit
of a nightmare. I'm sure all of this is pretty standard and would be
grateful for advise based on good experience!

For telescope control and guiding, just about anything will do. You
could use a 10 year old Pentium 2 at 166MHz. Where you want the computer
power is for processing. For that, you can never have enough memory. If
you run a 32-bit OS, get 4GB of ram, and set things up so apps have
access to 3GB (there's a boot switch for this). If you're going to have
this computer for a while, make sure it can support a 64-bit OS. You may
want to get such an OS right away if your camera has 64-bit drivers. If
possible, I'd recommend XP over Vista, but you may not have a choice.

You don't need anything special in the way of graphics. If you're
running a single monitor, typical onboard graphics will be fine.
Photoshop has no special demands, and neither do Maxim or other image
processing programs. Of course, if you're planning on using the computer
for gaming or other 3D apps, you'll want a nicer graphics card. Running
two monitors is trivial- you can either use two video cards, or better,
a video card with two separate outputs. They're very common, and Windows
will operate both displays with no effort at all.
_________________________________________________

Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com