Digital BW, The Print

Before I decided to move my workspace completely from my the office to my
home, I used a Toshiba Satellite for about a year and a half at home for
everything. PS, Illy, InDesign (all CS) plus Nikon Capture to control my
camera and Nikon Browser and other more arcane software necessary to do
business. The machine is running XP Home (ugh!), has a 16" screen, 1 gig of
RAM, Pentium P4 2.8 and a Nvidia graphics card, 60 gig hard.

When I first started using it, I processed some 400mb files with PS CS with
fair results, e.g., slow but sure. Smaller files were processed much faster.
As time went on, and the inevitable crud built up on the hard drive and I
added a couple of 120 Gig Maxtor External hards, which took some strain off
the internal hard. Helped some but nothing to write home about. I did have
one of the externals partitioned and used one of the partitions for a PS
scratch disk and that helped some. Again nothing to get excited about.

Most laptop hard drives are not speed demons, VS the sata's at 7200 and
blazing scuzzies at 15,000 rpm. Love 'e,\m

I have used the laptop quite a bit to control my D100 in location work with
and without access to power. ( I bought a cheap inverter at Wal-Mart to
charge both camera and computer batteries on the road and that works well).
The camera control setup works well, even better if clients are around when
the shooting is going on. It blows their minds.

Realizing this is a BW board, I'll venture to color just a bit. I found that
even calibrating the laptop display with a Spyder did not bring it up to CRT
standards as far as accuracy goes. The good new is if you are shooting RAW,
you have to opportunity to correct the raw in either Nikon Capture or PS CS
(or 7 with the plug-in) later on a good CRT setup (I now have dual LaCie
19's with the custom made computer that replaced the laptop in my home
office.

From this point on, given the success of digital photography versus film for
my business, I will always have a reasonably stout laptop for capture and
some processing sway from the home or office.

BTW, a good source for additional laptop memory is crucial.com. You can
crank your Model No., etc into their data base and get back what will work
with your machine. Pretty cool. They make RAM for a lot of computer mfrs and
market under their own name. I've always been satisfied.

I hope this is not overkill. Feel free to contact me off-list for additional
info. I'm grateful for a lot of good info from this list and hopefully this
is a good method of repaying the courtesy.

Kindest regards,
Joe

jdempsey@...


 -----Original Message-----
From: Ken Carney [mailto:kcarney1@...]
Sent: Tuesday, October 05, 2004 9:43 PM
To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com
Subject: RE: desktop-replacement notebooks (was Re: [Digital BW]
QTR/OSX/7600 -- upgrade report)


  I'm no computer expert, but I did get an IBM Thinkpad last week to take on
  the road.  I can bring the CF cards back to the motel and download the raw
  files to HD and also burn to a CD in case the notebook gets stolen.  My
  reservation about using it for PS is that it has a 1.5 mobil processor,
and
  more importantly mine came with 768mb of RAM, only upgradeable to 1.3gb
(for
  $600 extra!).  This notebook _is_ a replacement for my office PC, with the
  IBM docking station (a real POS), LCD monitor and wireless keyboard and
  mouse.  But we use a Citrix server and VPN for most everything, so there
is
  little computational work going on at the desktop.  I tend to think that
for
  PS a good solution would be a powerful desktop and an el cheapo notebook
to
  download files and burn CDs on the road.

  Regards,

    --Ken Carney
      www.kencarney.com

  >
  > I changed Sanders' subject only because I'm more curious
  > about how well various notebooks (Windows or Mac) work when
  > used at the front end of the process. Especially in
  > combination with a second display at home and with a digital
  > camera when away from home or office.



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