MS Vista or XP

[Gerry Harrison]

Hello,

I am in the market for a new computer and want it basically tuned for photo work..it may be a desktop ot note book still undecided. I am curious for those who have switched from MS XP to Vista how the new system is behaving...I have heard reports from my computer store that he has made alot of money off VISTA to date ( bugs ) and stick with XP for now. Any other suggestions for a photo based computer would be a big help also, eg. hard drive size , video card, memory....processor, usb types, yada yada yada. Oh ya I should have mentioned I shoot film at the moment ...but am on the way to digital scanning etc.

Thanks for your help gents.

[Rider]

Apple.

[eric black]

As someone who uses both Apple and Windows- I would say choose Apple if at all possible- if not, choose XP for now- Vista drivers are still a bit of an issue and until that is resolved (by time) you are better off with XP

[Wayne Crider]

I'm in a situation where I am going to setup my sisters new office computer network and it will be on XP. Vista is too young to get involved with.

If Photoshop'ing get extra ram, 20" monitor min, Core 2 Duo processor, and an independent Graphics card. Cruise over to PC Mag and read, read, read.

[Glenn Thoreson]

I've only had very limited experience with Vista. I hate it. I would stick with XP, which is very user friendly.

[Dave Parker]

Currently Vista is still in its first stages and there are a limited number of drivers for the various programs that us photographers use, so I would stick to XP which even with its quirks has just about anything you need to process and do photography with..

As far as Apple, I hear they are good sliced with a bit of sugar and cinnamon over them!

Dave

[Kirk Fry]

So first of all let me say I have no experience with Apple. In general you pay 2X what you would pay for a Windows solution for a fancy interface and cool looking hardware. If that is your thing, by all means go for it. Now that they are just wintel boxes I can't imagine that Photoshop is going to run any better on an apple than a window.
Processors are easy. Core 2. Even the cheap ones (E4300 and E6300) will over clock to 3 GHz. AMD is toast.

The OS is less easy. I have been running Vista since Beta I and now have ultimate running. I use Xp at work to do boring stuff like office. Xp feels faster because it does not do the windows fade thing that Vista does. Xp snaps, Vista fades. Photoshop CS3 beta seemed to run fine on Vista beta II. I have yet to crash Vista. Can one live without Vista for the next year or so, absolutely. Should one? No idea. If one has two boxes, get Vista home premium and play. Use the other box for production with Xp. Eventually you will know. Office 2007 is a trip and runs fine on Xp. They MOVED everything, no more menus, just ribbons. The softies say the new interface is faster (once you spend 6 months figuring out what they did with everything). Excel now has 16,000 columns and 1,000,000 rows. MS is making a big push into HDphoto to replace jpeg. Supposed to be way cool like ME. We will see. So far it is useless until output devices (cameras and scanners) actually output in the format. There is a photoshop plug in for it. For the other stuff get 4 Gig (8 is better) of main memory, a SATA hybrid drive when they come out, forget raid unless you do raid 1 for data protection and know what your are doing, any video card costing more than $100 that has dual outputs is fine (DirectX 10 is the next new thing, but I doubt you need it if you don't play 3D games) and some sort of a DVD writer. For monitors you WANT a 20 inch dual monitor set up. Laptops tend to be slow because their hard drives run bog slow and their processors are wimpy due to heat and power constraints.

K

[PViapiano]

I use XP Pro and Home...solid as a tank.

The poster above wrote about Vista effects (fade)...I'm sure there's a dialog to turn it off somewhere. XP has the same kind of effects...just turn it off and it'll speed up the whole experience.

[Jeff Conrad]

With 32-bit Windows (either XP or Vista), you're limited to 4 GB of physical RAM, and for Photoshop, you want every bit of that. Using the RAM for Photoshop is somewhat trickier than may be obvious, however.

The 4 GB virtual address space includes memory-mapped hardware such as video RAM, so My Computer|Properties typically reports only 3 ~ 3.5 GB of available RAM (this is a good reason not to get a video card with too much RAM--256 MB should be more than enough, and should also suffice if you eventually upgrade to Vista).

By default, 32-bit Windows limits the virtual address space of any process to 2 GB, leaving 2 GB for the system. Windows XP Professional allows a boot switch that can allocate up to 3 GB to the process (at the expense of the system). No mention is made of Win XP Home, implying that it won't recognize the switch, but I don't know of anyone who actually has confirmed that it doesn't work. Absent a confirmation that XP Home will take the boot switch, I'd go with Pro if you decide to use XP.

You avoid the 4 GB limit on physical memory with a 64-bit OS (XP or Vista), but you should verify driver availability before going this route. With a 64-bit OS, a 32-bit process (such as Photoshop), the virtual address space is still limited to 4 GB, but I think, under certain conditions, the memory-mapped hardware can be outside the 4 GB range, leaving more available to applications.

Windows memory allocation is described at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/aa366778.aspx

The boot switches are described at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/information/bootini.mspx

I can describe adding the boot switch in more detail if anyone desires.

[Anthony Lewis]

I use both Mac and Windows. If you have a chance to change over - go to Mac now. It is no more expensive than an equivlent PC and is so much nicer to use.