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Computer System for Digital Photography: MS-Windows, Apple, or Linux
I need a new computer. The major jobs are internet serfing and digital
photography. What're the pros and cons between these three systems: MS-Windows, Apple (iMac G4 or G5), or Linux-PC? I'm focusing on the digital photography. I've only used Wintel so far. My concerns on MS-Windows system is its rapid speed degradation due to MS's endless patches and the occasional Trojan/spywares. I don't know how to prevent it, as my whole family are on every newly purchased PCs. All my computer got z-times performance loss a month after the purchasing. A friend told me he no longer had the problem since he switched to iMac. But he is not sure it's because he has different habit, or because the IMac is less targeted by these malicious software. My concern on the iMac is, is it equally supported by all the major digital photography softwares. Photoshop-CS is not a problem, but what about, say, Neat-Image or whatever that is useful and important? Linux PC seems the best buy in terms of hardware price. Linux has play an important roles in my work place, where all the high performance servers are Linux systems. It usually either works far better than or far worse than, say, Solaris systems. Overall, it's better. But I've never had a HOME PC with Linux. Is it well supported, particularly for digital photography. |
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For home use, I definitely recommend a PC running Windows XP.
The speed degradation you get on your new PCs must be due to some problem - are you a lot of downloaded software or something? Regards Gary Hendricks www.basic-digital-photography.com |
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wrote in message
oups.com... I need a new computer. The major jobs are internet serfing and digital photography. What're the pros and cons between these three systems: MS-Windows, Apple (iMac G4 or G5), or Linux-PC? I'm focusing on the digital photography. I've only used Wintel so far. My concerns on MS-Windows system is its rapid speed degradation due to MS's endless patches and the occasional Trojan/spywares. I don't know how to prevent it, as my whole family are on every newly purchased PCs. All my computer got z-times performance loss a month after the purchasing. A friend told me he no longer had the problem since he switched to iMac. But he is not sure it's because he has different habit, or because the IMac is less targeted by these malicious software. My concern on the iMac is, is it equally supported by all the major digital photography softwares. Photoshop-CS is not a problem, but what about, say, Neat-Image or whatever that is useful and important? Linux PC seems the best buy in terms of hardware price. Linux has play an important roles in my work place, where all the high performance servers are Linux systems. It usually either works far better than or far worse than, say, Solaris systems. Overall, it's better. But I've never had a HOME PC with Linux. Is it well supported, particularly for digital photography. Like an awful lot of people who will respond after my post, I've had my complaints and gripes with the various versions of windows. However, I've concluded you just have to join them. There is a lot of shareware in addition to regular retailers for software, Hardware for the pc is cheaper and more plentiful than for the mac. As for Linux, I tried it once, could never find the drivers for the hardware I had at the time. Great for servers and industry, good for techies at home, for the family forget it. Now for spam and virus. Use something like mailwasher. If you have more than one account, get the pro version which will cost, but not much. You won't stop all spam, but it will never make it to your machine. Get bootitng from terabyteunlimited.com. This will let you make partitions and save as image files, a great utility and doesn't cost much. If you have kids that play games, you might want to set them up in their own partition. Use virus protection software, avast is free and works well. I've never had a virus, but at one time literally thousands of attacks from sven. Finally, I have three mail accounts one of which is hotmail. I do not receive spam from hotmail or one of the accounts. I get lot's from the third and I am going to drop that isp. I can only conclude that the spam free ones are doing some sort of filtering. By the way, with today's huge hd's, if you use bootitng as I suggested, you can quite happily set up a parallel windows and linux partition. That's what I did, fairly painlessly (there is good support for doing this). Just be sure the machine you buy has the linux support. Visit the www.terabyteunlimited.com website, get on their forum and post there, you'll find lots of users running both. Good luck, and don't be so pessimistic about windows, it's not all that bad and xp home works very well with good multimedia support. Use the partitioning software to separate the os from data, do this early, make image files of the os so you can always return to a known good point without starting from scratch. Make sure you get a good dvd burner. Dave Cohen |
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wrote in message oups.com...
I need a new computer. The major jobs are internet serfing and digital photography. What're the pros and cons between these three systems: MS-Windows, Apple (iMac G4 or G5), or Linux-PC? I'm focusing on the digital photography. Stick with Wintel. Unless you've already used unix or a unix variant, the learning curve for Linux will be ridiculous. As for Apple, they're dying a slow painful death, in spite of their marketing claims. The only reason they're still in business at all is because of investments by MS. |
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Apparently, _Dave Cohen_, on 25/12/04 21:46,typed:
wrote in message oups.com... I need a new computer. The major jobs are internet serfing and digital photography. What're the pros and cons between these three systems: MS-Windows, Apple (iMac G4 or G5), or Linux-PC? I'm focusing on the digital photography. I've only used Wintel so far. My concerns on MS-Windows system is its rapid speed degradation due to MS's endless patches and the occasional Trojan/spywares. I don't know how to prevent it, as my whole family are on every newly purchased PCs. All my computer got z-times performance loss a month after the purchasing. A friend told me he no longer had the problem since he switched to iMac. But he is not sure it's because he has different habit, or because the IMac is less targeted by these malicious software. My concern on the iMac is, is it equally supported by all the major digital photography softwares. Photoshop-CS is not a problem, but what about, say, Neat-Image or whatever that is useful and important? Linux PC seems the best buy in terms of hardware price. Linux has play an important roles in my work place, where all the high performance servers are Linux systems. It usually either works far better than or far worse than, say, Solaris systems. Overall, it's better. But I've never had a HOME PC with Linux. Is it well supported, particularly for digital photography. Like an awful lot of people who will respond after my post, I've had my complaints and gripes with the various versions of windows. However, I've concluded you just have to join them. There is a lot of shareware in addition to regular retailers for software, Hardware for the pc is cheaper and more plentiful than for the mac. As for Linux, I tried it once, could never find the drivers for the hardware I had at the time. Great for servers and industry, good for techies at home, for the family forget it. Suse, Mandrake and Fedora Linuxes make everything a breeze. The difficulties you are talking about are long gone (Linux and related software is at an extremely fast development path). e.g. to download my pics from my G5, I don't need to install any additional software, it just works. Now for spam and virus. Use something like mailwasher. If you have more than one account, get the pro version which will cost, but not much. You won't stop all spam, but it will never make it to your machine. Get bootitng from terabyteunlimited.com. This will let you make partitions and save as image files, a great utility and doesn't cost much. If you have kids that play games, you might want to set them up in their own partition. Use virus protection software, avast is free and works well. I've never had a virus, but at one time literally thousands of attacks from sven. Finally, I have three mail accounts one of which is hotmail. I do not receive spam from hotmail or one of the accounts. I get lot's from the third and I am going to drop that isp. I can only conclude that the spam free ones are doing some sort of filtering. Windows can be used more safely, but the downside is you need to gain at least some knowledge about your OS and become Internet literate (first step: IE is NOT "the internet"). - Install a firewall (zonealarm is free) and/or get a router (a hardware router is pretty cheap nowadays, $5~$40). - Have a good anti virus (AVG is free, as are some others). - Have an anti spyware program (spybot, ad aware are free). - Never use good email address in newsgroups, make a dispensable one in yahoo or hotmail etc. - Do NOT use IE. Using it is an invitation to spyware and other bad stuff. Install Firefox (http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/) or some other similar browser. Firefox is free, has tabbed browsing and is much much more secure than IE. - Do NOT use outlook, it just lets itself get high jacked by spyware related stuff. One choice: Thunderbird (www.mozilla.org) due to same reasons as Firefox above. - Keep your Windows installation fully updated. By the way, with today's huge hd's, if you use bootitng as I suggested, you can quite happily set up a parallel windows and linux partition. That's what Yup, that is going to be a reasonable installation while getting introduced to Linux. I did, fairly painlessly (there is good support for doing this). Just be sure the machine you buy has the linux support. Visit the Most of the desktop are supported. The problems could be the ones which have brand new hardware whose drivers are not written in Linux yet. www.terabyteunlimited.com website, get on their forum and post there, you'll find lots of users running both. Good luck, and don't be so pessimistic about windows, it's not all that bad and xp home works very well with good multimedia support. Use the partitioning software to separate the os from data, do this early, make image files of the os so you can always return to a known good point without starting from scratch. Make sure you get a good dvd burner. Dave Cohen GL, -HS |
#9
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Apparently, _Dave Cohen_, on 25/12/04 21:46,typed:
wrote in message oups.com... I need a new computer. The major jobs are internet serfing and digital photography. What're the pros and cons between these three systems: MS-Windows, Apple (iMac G4 or G5), or Linux-PC? I'm focusing on the digital photography. I've only used Wintel so far. My concerns on MS-Windows system is its rapid speed degradation due to MS's endless patches and the occasional Trojan/spywares. I don't know how to prevent it, as my whole family are on every newly purchased PCs. All my computer got z-times performance loss a month after the purchasing. A friend told me he no longer had the problem since he switched to iMac. But he is not sure it's because he has different habit, or because the IMac is less targeted by these malicious software. My concern on the iMac is, is it equally supported by all the major digital photography softwares. Photoshop-CS is not a problem, but what about, say, Neat-Image or whatever that is useful and important? Linux PC seems the best buy in terms of hardware price. Linux has play an important roles in my work place, where all the high performance servers are Linux systems. It usually either works far better than or far worse than, say, Solaris systems. Overall, it's better. But I've never had a HOME PC with Linux. Is it well supported, particularly for digital photography. Like an awful lot of people who will respond after my post, I've had my complaints and gripes with the various versions of windows. However, I've concluded you just have to join them. There is a lot of shareware in addition to regular retailers for software, Hardware for the pc is cheaper and more plentiful than for the mac. As for Linux, I tried it once, could never find the drivers for the hardware I had at the time. Great for servers and industry, good for techies at home, for the family forget it. Suse, Mandrake and Fedora Linuxes make everything a breeze. The difficulties you are talking about are long gone (Linux and related software is at an extremely fast development path). e.g. to download my pics from my G5, I don't need to install any additional software, it just works. Now for spam and virus. Use something like mailwasher. If you have more than one account, get the pro version which will cost, but not much. You won't stop all spam, but it will never make it to your machine. Get bootitng from terabyteunlimited.com. This will let you make partitions and save as image files, a great utility and doesn't cost much. If you have kids that play games, you might want to set them up in their own partition. Use virus protection software, avast is free and works well. I've never had a virus, but at one time literally thousands of attacks from sven. Finally, I have three mail accounts one of which is hotmail. I do not receive spam from hotmail or one of the accounts. I get lot's from the third and I am going to drop that isp. I can only conclude that the spam free ones are doing some sort of filtering. Windows can be used more safely, but the downside is you need to gain at least some knowledge about your OS and become Internet literate (first step: IE is NOT "the internet"). - Install a firewall (zonealarm is free) and/or get a router (a hardware router is pretty cheap nowadays, $5~$40). - Have a good anti virus (AVG is free, as are some others). - Have an anti spyware program (spybot, ad aware are free). - Never use good email address in newsgroups, make a dispensable one in yahoo or hotmail etc. - Do NOT use IE. Using it is an invitation to spyware and other bad stuff. Install Firefox (http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/) or some other similar browser. Firefox is free, has tabbed browsing and is much much more secure than IE. - Do NOT use outlook, it just lets itself get high jacked by spyware related stuff. One choice: Thunderbird (www.mozilla.org) due to same reasons as Firefox above. - Keep your Windows installation fully updated. By the way, with today's huge hd's, if you use bootitng as I suggested, you can quite happily set up a parallel windows and linux partition. That's what Yup, that is going to be a reasonable installation while getting introduced to Linux. I did, fairly painlessly (there is good support for doing this). Just be sure the machine you buy has the linux support. Visit the Most of the desktop are supported. The problems could be the ones which have brand new hardware whose drivers are not written in Linux yet. www.terabyteunlimited.com website, get on their forum and post there, you'll find lots of users running both. Good luck, and don't be so pessimistic about windows, it's not all that bad and xp home works very well with good multimedia support. Use the partitioning software to separate the os from data, do this early, make image files of the os so you can always return to a known good point without starting from scratch. Make sure you get a good dvd burner. Dave Cohen GL, -HS |
#10
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"Roger N. Clark (change username to rnclark)" writes:
I would switch over to linux completely if photoshop CS and later versions were on it, as well as a few other programs. ... However, I still use a windows XP machine for digital photography. Why? There is no choice for the work I do. If I only used photoshop, I would get a mac. If all the programs I need were on a mac, I would switch. If they were all on linux, I would switch. What programs? All you mentioned was Photoshop. Maybe you don't need those other programs. I get by ok with Gimp instead of Photoshop, but a more serious photog might have problems with that. |
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