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Time for me to go Mac...

Joseph Ramos

Workshop Member
Hi all,
This is my first post and I am making it on my wifes MacBook instead of my MacBook Pro. My hard drive failed Friday after 6 months of owning it. Thank god I have a Mac store in town, they were able to take the pictures that I had on my desktop that I had not backed up yet, and move them to a portable drive. The people at the store were great. This MacBook Pro is my fourth Mac and the first one that has failed. I wish I could say the same for my PCs. Anyways if not for the people at the Mac store I would have lost all the pictures I had on the desktop including all the pictures I had just taken a week before in Maui. Please folks make sure you always back up your pictures right away!
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
Hi Joe, and thanks for that info --- also GREAT they rescued your images! One of other factors for me deciding to go mac is in addiion to having two Mac gurus nearby who are willing to help me, there are at least three well-stocked Apple stores within about a 5 mile radius.
 
C

Chris Herbert

Guest
Hi Jack,

I have a program running on my Mac called Tech Tool Pro 4 (micromat.com), which does things similar to what the Norton Utilities programs used to do for Mac before OS-X came out. There's apparently built-in checks within the hard drives themselves that can be accessed and that may be able to predict a potential HD failure. I've thus got those set to run at every log-in and then every hour that the computer's running. It's automatic and in the background and never seems to slow anything down. Not sure if they'd work to actually predict something enough in advance, but seems worth a try nonetheless.

The other recommendation I'd make to a new Mac owner is to regularly run the Verify/Repair Permissions function in Apple's Disk Utility (it should be on the first install disk). I run this every time Apple updates software and often find that permissions have gone out of whack. I can't say I'm really sure what these permission things are, but keeping them in good shape is supposedly a wise idea according to some Mac gurus I've read at macfixit.com.

Chris
 

fotografz

Well-known member
Well, this is a timely batch of info folks. I have to dump a pile of cash before Jan. 1 or give it to Uncle Sammy's financial folks at the IRS next April : -(

I've never used anything but a Mac. I've held out from updating my 2 GHz Dual processor G5 (older fan cooled). It has a 150 gig HD and a 150 Gig Scratch Disk with 5 Gigs of SDRAM. I'm using two 23" Cinema displays. I am overwhelming this set up now. I have eight 500 gig drives for storage of working files.

PLEASE help me spend my money : -)

Here are my needs:

Has to be dual monitors, the bigger the better for wedding client presentations of slide shows and stuff like that ... but more importantly for studio shooting where I can see the monitors as I shoot at the camera.

Commercial photography is a primary driver for spec'ing this Mac. That, and a crushing load of wedding images every freaking weekend in the Summer.

I frequently shoot MF digital tethered to the computer via Firewire 800 interface. The thumbnails are on one screen and the second screen features the last shot taken full screen which I can refer to remotely as I shoot. So speed is the most important aspect here.

For example, this Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday we shot continuously for 8 hours straight producing thousands of images for Unilever Foods. It was all lifestyle type work with models in action mixed in with package shots and some food set-ups. I was using live feed video for the MF back and shooting at peak moments in the action.

The other prime use is weddings. I down load all my work and the work of my second shooter into one file, sort by time shot and dump it all into Adobe Lightroom. 1000 to 1500 RAW shots from a 16 gig Canon (soon to be a 22 meg Canon) is not unusual. Up to 400 to 500 of those can be from a 39 meg MF back ( i.e. BIG files ).

Lastly, I do multi layer type work for both of the above ... PLUS I am a full time Advertising creative person doing ads and design that requires layer work that can produce a single file of a gig or more. It is possible that the future holds video editing also, as my primary job is doing TV commercials ... and we produce "Test Commercials" before ever going to a full up production in Hollywood or NYC. Desktop motion editing can be a real money maker.

Other peripherals: Epson 2400, Epson 3800, Imacon 949 Scanner, Epson V750 Pro Flatbed.

Suggestions?
 

Lars

Active member
fotografz,

Re monitor choice, our experience with 30" displays at Light Crafts - arguably two years ago with G5's but I believe still valid - was that memeory bandwidth becomes a bottleneck.

The 30-inchers have 4 megapixels as compared to 2 mpx for the 1920x1200 resolution. Twice as much data to move to and from the graphics card. More of an issue in photography than in video I believe, until you go full HD.

Two lessons to learn:
- When configuring a workstation, memory bus speed is critical. Not much choice on the Mac side - you can only get the fastest :)
- If large monitors is important (for slide shows/tethered work) consider 27" 1920x1200 rather than 30" cinema displays. Then again, maybe presentations on a 30" will bring in more revenue for you.

Lars
 

Guy Mancuso

Administrator, Instructor
Marc you need a new Mac Pro my friend. I would get a 3.0 dual than about 6mgs of Ram minimum which is what I have but you maybe better with 8. Buy them from here for 600 dollars the ram http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/memory/Mac-Pro-Memory

I would also buy the hard drives from them also. Now the trick is getting the right video card . I have the ATI 1900 which will drive two 30 inch Cinema display's without a issue. I drive a 30 and 23 inch at times. Actually for our workshops what we are going to do this time is bring my Mac Pro run two 30 inch display from this card than the basic card run two 23 inch display's. We will put the two 30 and 1 23 inch in front of the attendees and we will work off one 23 inch. That should be pretty darn cool .

Here I configured one add the tax though

Mac Pro
Part Number: Z0D8
Both Bluetooth 2.0+EDR and AirPort Extreme
One 16x SuperDrive
Apple Keyboard and Mighty Mouse - U.S. English
Accessory kit
Two 3.0GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon
Mac OS X - U.S. English
1GB (2 x 512MB)
500GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
ATI Radeon X1900 XT 512MB (2 x dual-link DVI)
Gift message: Add

Remove $3,755.00 $3,755.00
Estimated Ship: 2-4 business days
.Mac - Retail Box Promotion
Part Number: BC847LL/A

Remove $69.95 $69.95
Estimated Ship: Within 24 hours
AppleCare Protection Plan for Mac Pro (w/or w/o Display) - Auto-enroll
Part Number: S2512Z/A

Remove $249.00 $249.00
Estimated Ship: Within 24 hours
Cart Subtotal: $4,073.95
Free Shipping: $0.00

Estimated Total: $4,073.95


Than take out there Ram , and add the 8gb from Old world . Than leave the 500gb in there for backup than buy three other drives of your choice. i am running my OS off a WD 10k Raptor
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
FWIW, the latest batch of Intel processors (just announced this week) have moved FSB speeds up to 1600 MHz --- and Apple has been buying them up, so I'd suspect an updated processor in the Mac Pro within the next few weeks. See here: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=385872

The $250 upgrade Radeon x1900 is said to drive 2 30-inchers pretty well in 2D apps, but the Nvidia 4500 will supposedly handle 2 30-inchers with 3D very well, but its like $1500 upgrade.

They did just up the Macbook Pro's processor and the new ones have a two-week delivery right now. So I'm holding off a few more weeks on MBP and new Mac Pro.

:D
 

Guy Mancuso

Administrator, Instructor
looks like it went to 2.6 . Damn i have the 2.4

With its two processor cores, the Intel Core 2 Duo processor offers virtually twice the computational power of a traditional single processor in the same space. To enjoy the greatest possible performance for processor-intensive tasks such as video rendering, gaming, and more, you can upgrade the processor in your MacBook Pro from the standard 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo to an even faster 2.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo.
 

fotografz

Well-known member
Talked to the Small Business rep at the Apple Store, and the 1600 rumor is true. She couldn't confirm when it'll be in the pipe line, but I asked if it would be viable before I start wedding season in early Spring, and she said she could definitely hook me up by then. She hinted at possible 1 terabyte drives : -)

I'll limp along until then.
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
FWIW, the 1TB 7200RPM SATAII drives are already here --- Our local Fry's had them in stock and on sale last week --- WD Greens at $269 each. Talk about cheap storage: that's 54 cents a Gig for fully redundant (RAID 1) storage ;)

BTW, another issue with the new processors is they'll support 800 MHz RAM speeds. Current RAM speed is 667, and supposedly the biggest bottleneck in current Mac Pro performance (it can only handle 4 processors at that speed, so the 8-core machine has to share that, effectively halving the RAM throughput). The new 800RAM will probably be killer expensive when available, but hopefully the old RAM will still work (and it's cheap) until the 800 prices come down.
 

Reynolds

Workshop Member
Jack, as you know, I just moved to an iMac 24 this past Wednesday. I can't tell you the joy of having a machine that simply works! Leopard is easy, reliable and flawless at this point. My Blackberry even likes to sync with it which was not the case with my Vista PC.

Like you, Vista did it! Just deleting a file was a chore. I have missed Office 2007 but am determined to learn and use iWorks totally. So far, it does everything I want it to do. Every time I come up with a new (often old) task, it performs. I thought I would miss MS Publisher until I found out how much Pages will do. Fabulous!!!

Time Machine....well, absolutely the best! It has saved me two or three times when making some new Mac owner mistakes.

And, all of your Photoshop lessons...what a treat to see the detail of this big monitor. El Capitan never looked so good. BTW, Adobe let's you have 5 "platform changes" in a lifetime. In other words, PC to Mac, and they send out the Mac software free of charge. Guy covered that earlier.

Safari is a super browser, mail is a champ, address book syncs everywhere, iCal as well, iTunes/iPod a breeze, disc burning a snap, Quicken moved right in (Mac software $69), recognized and interfaced with my HP printer instantly and transferred data at the Apple store in minutes.

My son-in-law wanted the PC, so he's now laboring away with the thing. At 36, he can have at it. At 63, life is too short!!

Tremendous experience!! Don't look back!!

Best
 
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Greg Lockrey

New member
My Dell laptop that I use for scanning and printing crapped out yesterday. Rather than have it fixed, I'm going to pitch it since it's just a 512 ram. Had it over five years anyway. So now I'm looking to upgrade the replacement. I am thinking about one of those Macbook Pro's with "full tilt boogie". My question is will I be able to use my CD's that have all of my picture files, they are in PC format? I have well over 10,000 of these. I also like Qimage a lot, I know that there is some kind of interface required to use it on the Mac's. Or should I just stay with a PC. I also have Photoshop CS and plan to upgrade to CS3 but would the Aperture 1.5 be worth adding on too or instead of the CS3? Being here in the Tundra as I am, I don't get to put my eyes on these other systems.
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
The files on CD should be fine. However, files stored on a remote Win drive (NTFS) are not. I simply ported ALL my NTFS/PC drive image files over to newly formatted Mac drives via Gig-LAN --- took several hours, but hey, I just let it run all night ;)

I really like CS3, but then I use Photoshop a lot. I have LR, but don't really use it unless I need to batch process a bunch of jpegs.
 

Greg Lockrey

New member
The files on CD should be fine. However, files stored on a remote Win drive (NTFS) are not. I simply ported ALL my NTFS/PC drive image files over to newly formatted Mac drives via Gig-LAN --- took several hours, but hey, I just let it run all night ;)

I really like CS3, but then I use Photoshop a lot. I have LR, but don't really use it unless I need to batch process a bunch of jpegs.
That's good to know.

Thanks Jack
 
S

Sean_Reid

Guest
The files on CD should be fine. However, files stored on a remote Win drive (NTFS) are not. I simply ported ALL my NTFS/PC drive image files over to newly formatted Mac drives via Gig-LAN --- took several hours, but hey, I just let it run all night ;)

I really like CS3, but then I use Photoshop a lot. I have LR, but don't really use it unless I need to batch process a bunch of jpegs.
FWIW, my understanding is that the Mac OS can read NTFS drives but not write to them.

Cheers,

Sean
 
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