Reader's Comments - Index of - Free

Choosing a Computer System for Digital Imaging
100 MB each (at 14 bit/color, 4000 dpi). That means 6 or 7 images per CD.
Ridiculous. Get a DVD burner. Among DVD burners, possibly the best buy at the
moment is the Sony DRU500: it can burn basically any kind of DVD media (DVD-
R/RW, DVD+R/RW, DVD-RAM...) I have it and it's absolutely great.
Hard disks: I have a humble 120 GB ATA-133 7200 RPM hard disk (not a SCSI)
and I can still open a 100 MB Photoshop file in a few seconds. Whether a SCSI
hard disk is going to be faster than an ATA-133 depends on many factors, but
especially on the SCSI controller you have. Unless you have a fancy controller with
plenty of on board cache, you won't see much of a difference between SCSI and
ATA disks. The ATA's, though, are cheaper and you don't need an additional SCSI
controller that, in my own experience, can be an endless pain in the a** (because of
compatibility and performance issues).
Linux: great OS, I use it at work and I love it, but there is nor a decent color
calibration tool, neither a package comparable to Photoshop (there is "The Gimp",
but I find it doesn't come even close to PS 7, unfortunately).
-- Roberto Totaro, February 24, 2003
Great news! Photoshop Now Works in Linux! http://www.codeweavers.com/
products/office/supported_applications.php
It may not be free, but If you need to keep a windows box around for photo editing
like I do, you can chuck it now.
-- Robert Cohen, April 29, 2003
I just wanted to share my own "backup" sollution. I bought two identical 200Gb
($200 each) disks and installed them as D: and X: on my Windows XP system
(installed on C:). I save all my work on D: and every night at 03:00 am the system
starts to xcopy (with lots of flags) everything on D:, that has the archive flag active,
over to X: and resets the archive flag on the original file. So if I add a picture or
modify an existing image, it will be copied the next noght. Once a week I copy all
my work out on a DVD-RW and store it in my safe.
I started with this after I had, anot so plesant, experience with a disk crash om my
system. Lots of pictures from my digital camera and a few Adobe Premiere projects
diappeared!! I had all work stored on a Western Digital SE 200GB disk. The NTFS
partition was "Unreadable" from Disk Manager from within Windows XP. I read
lots about this problem and discovered that a progra called R-Studio (R-tools
Technology Inc) could help me. And it could!!! It scanned the entire disk for a few
http://www.photo.net/photo/computers (29 of 33)7/3/2005 2:19:07 AM