pictures & computers

I'm kinda new to photo processing on the computer. I have a canon t2i and I started using canon's DPP. Everything works fine till I try to convert to JPEG and my computer locks up about 80% into the conversion. I believe my problem is that I only have 512Mb of ram and DDP needs 1g. My computer is old and instead of upgrading this computer, maybe I just get a new one. Is there something I should look for in a new computer that would help in processing photos Money is not that much of an issue, so if there some cool things out there I'd like to hear about them.
Thanks,
Darts

Darts, just buy a midrange Dell or HP machine. Get a machine with a "Sandy Bridge" processor, with a 4 digit model number - eg the i5 2300 or i7 2600, not the 3 digit ones like 950 or 980. There were problems with the first batch of motherboards so you might have to wait a month. The older 3 digit model number ones are good, but i'd wait the month personally, if they're not available already.

You want windows 7 64-bit, and 4-8GB of RAM. You can buy separately an SSD if you want things really fast, and plus an extra hard drive to go inside it. You should also buy an external hard drive, back up everything to it, and keep it at a family member or friends house.

A computer for photo processing isn't really hard to put together, depending on your needs. Even if using Photoshop, unless you're putting together huge panoramas or editing a ton of layers, tim's recommendation of an i5/i7 processor and 4~8 gigs of ram should definitely be enough.

I have a 6 year old computer that still chugs along nicely ever since it was upgraded at one time to 2 gigs ram and a pentium 4 cpu, and I still use it to scan relatively beefy images into Photoshop CS5.

A new computer might fix your lock-up problem, but I was running DPP on a Windows XP computer with 512mb of RAM and had no problems other than it was slow if I had several photos open in DPP at one time. I definitely never had any lockups.