More game designer woe

So I'm happy with the design for my new game and have to start work on the art. In the past I've been burnt by creating art on the screen that when printed looks poor. Sort of stretched and pixelated ( is that even a word? ).

I spoke to the graphic artist at work and he's told me that my DPI is too small. After I got over the offence of being told my DPI is too small I asked him what on earth he was on about.

DPI is Dots Per Inch, and computer images are made up of dots. Further images on computer screens are about 75 PDI but when you print stuff, it's usually at 300 DPI and that's why my images all look so poor when printed.

Armed with this knowledge I tried(!) to create a 300DPI image. I started up Paint Shop Pro and created an A4 size blank image at 300DPI. KAPOW! The computer ground to a halt. I couldn't get it to react to anything I clicked on. Then after a minute or so it suddenly did one of the things I had clicked on. A short pause for thought and I realised that it was doing what I was telling it, only very,very,very slowly. A look at the front of the computer showed the disk light going ten to the dozen.

I realised that the new image I had just created was too much, too big for the computer and that it was paging a lot of its RAM onto the disk.

So much for 300DPI images, they must suck up a lot of RAM. I think that until I get a new computer I'm just going to have to put up with poor art work, and be creative with low DPI. Maybe I'll try 100 DPI and see how that works...maybe I'll get a Christmas bonus and be able to upgrade my computer, if only!