Is Q9550 still usable with photoshop and illustrator work?

[heartfulmind]

Hello, my desktop system in my office comes with Q9550, 3 x 1T HDDs, HD 4870 GPU, and 4 x 2GB DDR2.

We've been using this system for almost 7 years. We''ve upgraded only hard drives since we bought this system.

As a matter of fact, we haven't had any problem related to the stability of the system except some software carshes.

Nowadays, we are somewhat worried about the system going down because we've used it more than 8 hours a day almost everyday since we bought it.

If the systme goes wrong, the damage on our business can be huge even though we back up our files in other hard drives periodically.

Do you think we can use it for some more years, or start thinking about upgrading our system?

What is your recommendation?

Thanks in advance,

Si Hyoung

[Khenglish]

My main concern would be aging hard drives giving out. That 4870 will likely die at some point too (many vendors had terrible 4870 designs that were prone to failure), but that won't cause data loss so no big deal. Other than that I see no problem with using it.

[heartfulmind]

Thank you for your helpful input,

[intuxikated]

yes, photoshop isn't really that cpu heavy any more, so older CPU's like the q9550 will do fine, though using an SSD can always help, but it's not necessary and a core2quad will still suffice.