Update: Many phone calls and 3 weeks later my replacement computer should be here today. I have a chair and blanket, coffee and sitting on the porch with ipad tracking it. Maybe i should record this too. what a pain in the butt it has been.

New update: I got it.

Skinty: The Post Office have just changed their system - if you contact them you can stipulate it is OK to leave parcels with a neighbour (give house number) or if no signature req'd that it is OK to leave it in a safe place (if you have one). Works for me, I got sick of just missing the postie and having to drive 5 miles to somewhere that you have to pay to park just to collect a cheap parcel....

I thought this only happened with the UK post office. Sorry to hear that's not the case, as I know how frustrating it can be, as its happened to me on several occasions. Over here the post men (who are often on bikes or foot) just put a "sorry you were out" card through the door rather than carrying the weight of all the parcels on their delivery round. You then have to take the card to your local office (often miles away) to collect. I think they must put the card through and run! At least with no signature I presume you're covered? Did you pay by card?

Safire- Thanks. I am not at home right and on the iPad. The shipper I think was u-trac. Not sure who they are but have been in contact with them a few times today. We will see what happens. I'm without a computer still. Bummer. Well if it stops raining I'll go out and fill up some memory cards out at the coast.

parke1953 said:
Well i am like really bummed out. Checked tracking at about 10.05 said delivered at 9.56 and on the porch. Ran to the door no computer ( i want to say a lot of bad words right now). Panic and make some calls. 2 hours go by and no call back. I call customer service and now have to file lost package claim (it takes 7 to 10 days). My son was sitting about 8ft from the door and i was making toast about 12ft from the door, no knocking and no door bell. I check my door bell so many times I thought I should stop before I break it. Walked down the block an and checked the houses. No computer at any doors. Oh and customer service said that no signature was required. I wont give the company name unless you ask as it was the first time I have used them. Would have got it from B&H but they were out of stock. Sorry for all this rant but just venting. Wow bummer.

Sorry to hear about that Parke. That's horrible; who was the shipping carrier, UPS? I can't believe they shipped it without requiring a signature, for something that costly, it should be automatic. Hopefully it's just an error with their system....one time I got something through UPS that said delivered, however it ended up still being on the truck. But yea, if things don't pan out within the next few days, I would definitely file some sort of chargeback through your CC. Hope all goes well!

mirtos said:
Safyre - im not sure why you are saying that photoshop doesnt utilize the graphics card as far as editing images... thats really not true. RAM is key, but the graphics card is too. It really depends what type of editing you are doing. but a GPU gives a TON of performance gain when editing.

Mirtos, I didn't state that photoshop doesn't utilize the graphics card at all; I said it doesn't make much of a difference in regards to photo editing. The GPU acceleration is mostly beneficial for the 3D elements of Photoshop, not so much for 2D ones. Yes, there may be some very minimal gain when it comes to retouching photos (by no means a 'Ton' of difference), and it pales in comparison to upgrading your ram and cpu for the money. I would not recommend someone go out of their way to get a fancy video card for the sole purpose of photo editing. Now if they were to do video or 3d rendering, that would be a different story.

Well i am like really bummed out. Checked tracking at about 10.05 said delivered at 9.56 and on the porch. Ran to the door no computer ( i want to say a lot of bad words right now). Panic and make some calls. 2 hours go by and no call back. I call customer service and now have to file lost package claim (it takes 7 to 10 days). My son was sitting about 8ft from the door and i was making toast about 12ft from the door, no knocking and no door bell. I check my door bell so many times I thought I should stop before I break it. Walked down the block an and checked the houses. No computer at any doors. Oh and customer service said that no signature was required. I wont give the company name unless you ask as it was the first time I have used them. Would have got it from B&H but they were out of stock. Sorry for all this rant but just venting. Wow bummer.

Safyre - im not sure why you are saying that photoshop doesnt utilize the graphics card as far as editing images... thats really not true. RAM is key, but the graphics card is too. It really depends what type of editing you are doing. but a GPU gives a TON of performance gain when editing.

If you or your friends know anything about computers, build one yourself, if you are going for a desktop. You can build a PC that is so much better and more reliable and CHEAPER than anything you can buy.

Most pre-built systems (Apple ESPECIALLY) comes with FAAR less ram than it should for its price point.

kanuck- Glad I could help. Just found out that my new PC comes today. It was free shipping. Ordered it yesterday morning and here today. Now what do i do about a monitor. Moving sucks half in Texas and half here in California. Well by the time March comes around and we are completely moved I'll have two of everything. I love that women.

Excellent advice thanks parke1953 that would be terrible to be stuck at 8GB forever or at least for the next 5 years, which seems to be how long I use my notebooks for. My current one is a late 2006 model with upgraded RAM from 2GB to 4GB. Still fast enough for 24mp cameras. My M9, D600 were fine, but the D800e kicks it's butte. I am certain we will be at 25-30GB systems by 2018. I really feel the need for getting 12 right now or at least in March/April when I will have money again to spend on photography/editing equipment. Can't wait for 2013 its going to be a good year I am certain :)

27" iMac i7 Quad core 16GB RAM
27" Apple Cinema Display
2 - OCZ Vertex 3 SSD. I removed the internal hard drive and DVD to accommodate these.
ReadyNAS Pro - 6 Bay - 12TB of space. Anything not being worked on or not needed locally is moved to the NAS.

safyre- Thanks. Well I ordered the ASUS CM6870-US-3AD desktop early this morning and should be here Monday or Tuesday. So we shall see how it does next week. My old laptop still runs good and we take it when we travel. I download to it no problem and view pics. Editing pics with my D80 was ok but with the D800 not going to happen. I am looking for a laptop and a desktop for my wife for her work (no photos). She doesn't need much maybe an i5 would be great for her but I will look at that Asus G53sw. When we travel I could use it. Maybe(Hmmmm). Just looked up the Asus G53sw and that might work for her as she must have win7 also. Thanks again.

parke,

Those specs sound good. As for the laptop, I use an Asus G53sw (the now previous generation of gaming laptops). It has a Sandy Bridge i7 2630qm 2ghz processor, 2GB GTX460m card, and 16gb of ram (upgraded from the stock of 6gb).

Overall, it is a really solid machine, and definitely the better bang for the buck out of all those gaming laptops out there. Although I don't do much gaming, the specs are perfect in terms of photo editing. Having 16gb of ram allows me to allocate 8gb of ram to photoshop alone. I've been able to have 20 full size raw edits open at once without any slowdown, and that's with lightroom and other programs running as well. The quad core processor is awesome when it comes to speeding up export and import times. Additionally, it has a second hard drive bay so you can add an SSD drive to run the OS off of it for even faster performance. The video card doesn't really matter that much since Lightroom and Photoshop don't utilize it much with images, but its nice to have a good one! My suggestion is for whichever one you get, upgrade the ram to its max, as that usually is the bottleneck when it comes to editing programs.

sound cards are obviously not important but video card are

Do look a build quality as well as technical spec

the same spec desk top will normally out perform a laptop

desk tops ( towers ) are usually easier to upgrade and repair and in my experaice last longer than laptops

kanuck- Make sure you check out the main board to see how much ram it can take. Some of the notebooks that have 8GB ram may be at max. I think one of those notebooks came with 16GB. My old 17in Toshiba laptop max at 2GB ram and was over $2000. Now look at what you can for half that.

Parke1953, that amazing I have never seen any for sale with that much RAM. So far I have seen a few 10GB systems, but more often than not its 8. Getting up to 12 would be no trouble though I would just add the additional RAM at a local AS center for around $200 more. I have been running 4GB for years and they still sell these kinds of systems!

I am leaning towards a Samsung at this point and judging by previous posts it looks like the processor 2.5 to 3.5 and RAM are the two biggies for editing with L4 and CS5/CS6. I really couldn't care less about gaming and video editing so maybe graphics and sound cards are not necessary for me.

rensuchan- Thanks. Oh and the PC also comes with a 2TB HD. I'll think about the win8 but every IT guy or gal says never take the first run of any OS. It also came up in the windows8 thread or maybe this one but I'll still think about it and I still have the option to upgrade. One more question when you move a slider do you see the change right away( a while since I have seen that). When I get up in the morning make the wife coffee and then me and the cat send her off to work I go internet shopping.

parke1953 said:
Ready to get a pc. I found a ASUS CM6870-US-3AD win7,i7 3770,16gb ram nVIDIA GeForce GT 620 with 2GB Dedicated bunch of usb ports 3.0 and 2.0,dvd burner with the option to upgrade to win8 for free by 01/31/13. It should run PS5/6 and LR4. Anyone have any thoughts on this model.

kanuck- Also looking for a notebook for the wife and I came across some notebooks that all have 12GB ram or more and i7's,17in and 14in graphic cards in some.

Toshiba X875-Q7380, Intel Core i7-3630QM Asus G75VW-RS72, Intel Core I7-3610M Asus G75VW-FS71, Intel Core i7-3610M Samsung NP700G7C, Intel Core i7-3630 Sony S1512DCX/B, Intel Core i7-3632

The PC sounds good. I would take the free Windows 8 upgrade too if you like (or can at least tolerate) the modern interface. It seems to have helped with performance on my desktop running Lightroom 4.

Ready to get a pc. I found a ASUS CM6870-US-3AD win7,i7 3770,16gb ram nVIDIA GeForce GT 620 with 2GB Dedicated bunch of usb ports 3.0 and 2.0,dvd burner with the option to upgrade to win8 for free by 01/31/13. It should run PS5/6 and LR4. Anyone have any thoughts on this model.

kanuck- Also looking for a notebook for the wife and I came across some notebooks that all have 12GB ram or more and i7's,17in and 14in graphic cards in some.

Toshiba X875-Q7380, Intel Core i7-3630QM Asus G75VW-RS72, Intel Core I7-3610M Asus G75VW-FS71, Intel Core i7-3610M Samsung NP700G7C, Intel Core i7-3630 Sony S1512DCX/B, Intel Core i7-3632

Does this sound good for D800e files? I want to have a computer with the best specs available in the new year so that it will no longer takes 20+ minutes to process each D800e mage on my current computer. So far I am thinking along the lines of 1TB hard drive, GE-Force graphics card, and 10 GB of RAM, Intel processor (speed 1.8-2.2) and Windows 8. Also, I should mention it needs to be a notebook computer and if I could keep the weight down in the 1.75-2.5kg area that would be excellent.

Meleagris- My D800 came with the latest updates installed. Have not had this problem. Hope you get this resolved. Keeping my fingers crossed.

I was wondering if anyone had had issues with a D800 or D800E locking up since the new firmware came along? I have had my D800E lock up 3 times now. Each time an err is displayed and you can not turn the camera off. It is completely loced up and all I can do to recover it is to follow the steps below.

Turn off (even though it doesn't)
Remove battery
Remove cards
Wait period of time (20 sec) and reinstall battery.
Turn on (err is still flashing)
shoot a picture sans cards (Err disappears)
reinsert cards and go

I can find no pattern to the lockups. I have tried many solutions to unlock the error but only the sequence above seems to help. I was thinking this problem was solved with the latest firmware but it appears I have the latest version available.

Is there a solution to this I have missed short of the 6+ week trip to Nikon USA for warranty repairs?

JB

@corigliano: Having not use shutter propriety in a very, very, long time on any of my bodies, never the less, I just pulled out my D4 and test it out. The only thing I noticed when I was trying to get proper exposure, the F-stop would start to flash indicating that I was not at the right shutter speed for the lighting in the room. The exposure indicator on the right side, while looking threw the viewfinder also showed up indicating that I was under exposed. Are these the things you are referring to?

I have had my d4 for about three months now. Twice I have seen a problem with the meter indicator inside the view finder. The problem is as following. When in shutter priority mode the metering indicator pops up in the viewfinder and starts going crazy. I havent reached below my maximum aperture and am not using bracketing or exposure compensation. There should be no reason to even see the metering indicator. Any suggestions??