Re: [APML] 'Puter Questions

[Mark Bohrer <lurchl@ix.netcom.com>]

Warren:
My home Windoze desktop is an AMD K6 400MHz machine (Compaq) running XP. 
The K6 was contemporary with the P-II. I have 160MB RAM and also use 
Photoslop 6 on it. I process 2-4MB JPEG image files with it. It's very 
slow. I can't have Nikon Scan and Photoslop 6 simultaneously open without 
it moving at a snail's pace or crashing. XP runs more crash-free than Win98 
did. I upgraded to XP Pro a year ago when I got DSL.

I also have a 500MHz P-III Sony notebook on which I run Photoslop 7 and 
Dreamweaver 3 (for web page editing) in Win98. It has 192MB of RAM. It's 
much faster than the K6 desktop machine. I plan to upgrade the OS to 
Win2000 at some point.

I suspect you might have better results if you added RAM, though this may 
not be easy for an older machine (and the memory bus may be pretty slow). 
If I were you, I'd look at Fry's/Outpost.com or Tiger online for a P-III or 
P-IV machine with as much RAM as you can afford. With a TIF file of large 
size, unless you have large fractional gigabytes of RAM, Photoslop will be 
using a hard drive-based swap file which will be very slow.

That's one of the reasons I have 896MB of RAM on my 450MHz Mac G4, which 
finally talks to my Nikon LS4000ED scanner again thanks to updated drivers 
from Nikon. While it wasn't working, I went with the scanner driver and 
Photoshop on Windows instead, and am unlikely to go back to the Mac. 
(Nearly cost me a photo sale for a book cover last year.) Lesson: don't buy 
new OS software (OS X 10.1 in this case) unless drivers are available to 
support ALL your hardware!


At 02:25 AM 10/23/02 -0400, you wrote:
>Gents.
>            I'm still limping along on a Pentium II, 64 RAM. PS v.6 and 
> other large programs, has it behaving like a drunken snail, and seems a 
> bit unstable with fairly frequent lock-ups and error messages. (# of 
> stack pages, fatal exception...)
>
>Would an additional memory card help this, or is it more a result of the 
>processing chip speed? Time for a new one?!
>
>Also along these lines, are there problems, with any stage of post 
>processing, including smoothing, on a compressed TIFF file since a 22 MB, 
>35mm full-frame takes an unpractical eternity here?
>
>Thanks everyone!
>
>Warren A. Keller
>Billions and Billions- Astrophotos
><http://www.billionsandbillions.com>www.billionsandbillions.com

Mark Bohrer
www.kokophoto.com
Pro mountain bike racing on the web


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