PC issues

[revaaron]

the epic question... my Dell D620 Lattitude is excellent for all my "normal" needs.
but now that I'm working with MF scans (85MB 14000+x15000+) and my lappy is dying.

Cropping takes 5 minutes... photoshop is running 1GB+ memory, 1GB+ virtual.
I only have 2GB of RAM. I need to stay mobile, but what do other use?
any Lenovo W700 people out there?

[jing q]

I'm using a Sony SZ series with 4 gb of ram (3.25 readable in XP)
I used to do all my editting on the computer, and work with 33megapixel files.
not the fastest but it handles it well as long as the files aren't processed for 16 bit..I find the files take much longer only when the file takes up to 800mb

[Frank Doorhof]

Proberbly not the answer you want to hear but....

I used a quadcore 2.8 with 10gb and vsta64. A very quick system when working wit my digital back files. However when scanning (1gig files) the system slowed down too much. Cropping took anything between 20-50 seconds and working with healing brushes was a nightmare.

As laptop I bought a macbookpro and for fun tried it on that one to my horror under macos x it was slot faster (3-5 seconds) working on the digital files was app equal.

After some serious thinking I decided my next of would become a macpro and it did. At the moment I run bootcamp with vista 64 and mac os but have to admit that I hardly use vista anymore.

The way macos does mulitasking and manages the CPU/memory makes for a very big speed increase. The funny part of the story, my wife runs a pc store which I started over 15 years ago.
So we really know how to build pcs.
We got customers coming from all over because they are specialized in pcs for video, audio and photo.
Since I switched and she saw the speed increase she also started selling mac and I can say it has had a flying start

Long story short. Consider a mac all software you use can stop be used in a virtual machine or via bootcamp.

[BernardLanguillier]

the epic question... my Dell D620 Lattitude is excellent for all my "normal" needs.
but now that I'm working with MF scans (85MB 14000+x15000+) and my lappy is dying.

Cropping takes 5 minutes... photoshop is running 1GB+ memory, 1GB+ virtual.
I only have 2GB of RAM. I need to stay mobile, but what do other use?
any Lenovo W700 people out there?
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=219894\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

The first question I would ask is why you scan at such a high resolution? I would tend to think that 4000 DPI is about the highest reasonnable resolution for MF, even with the very best scanner. Beyond that I don't think that you are capturing much useful information. 4000 DPI should be about 9000 x 7000 pixels which is about 3.5 times less that what you currently have.

I am also on the Mac with a 16GB RAM, 8 cores Mac Pro, but I believe that there are now both Mac and Win laptops that do accept at least 4GB of RAM with double core (if not quad core).

The combination of lower resolutions and twice more RAM should speed up significantly you environment.

Cheers,
Bernard

[revaaron]

The first question I would ask is why you scan at such a high resolution? I would tend to think that 4000 DPI is about the highest reasonnable resolution for MF, even with the very best scanner. Beyond that I don't think that you are capturing much useful information. 4000 DPI should be about 9000 x 7000 pixels which is about 3.5 times less that what you currently have.

hm... I've just been scanning at the max (default) resolution.  I planned on scanning them at this resolution. crop/filp them. then run fix the color shifts from expire film and a little chromatic noise reduction where needed. Maybe a little healing brush cause my local shop can't seem to keep fluid from dripping on the freaking film.  Finally reduce the size of the file with sharping/usm.  Maybe I'll do all that and then compare it to a scan at 4000dpi.

I am also on the Mac with a 16GB RAM, 8 cores Mac Pro, but I believe that there are now both Mac and Win laptops that do accept at least 4GB of RAM with double core (if not quad core).

The combination of lower resolutions and twice more RAM should speed up significantly you environment.

I have to keep mobile so I need to buy laptops.  I'm waiting to upgrade my laptop until they come out with 45mn quad core laptops.  I'm a software engineer (database/automation) 9-5 and I wrote all my own automated image processing software (that breaks at JPEGs of 25MB unfortunately).  I wrote it so that the more cores I have and the faster pipeline to the HD the faster it will run. I'm not going to upgrade until it will run my automation faster/better.  If I were able to load 16GB of ram on a laptop, I would make a RAM drive out of 4GB and then re-write my software to copy to the RAM drive, process and then copy back.The reason I use this software is cause I go to a concert and then have to get the pictures up and get to bed with in an hour of getting home (I get home at 1am-3am and have to get  up at 7am).  One thing I've been thinking of doing is getting one of these:
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Notebo...?ProductID=2835
hooking a 2.5" drive to it and sorting/scripting/deleting the pictures.  Once I walk through the door, I could plug it into a desktop and hit "process"