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astro photography
- voyager
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- Super Giant
I don't know- 1GB can still work out pretty expensive for a laptop. 512Mb should be fine, even 256. Most of the image work we do is not very intensive on the hardware. Sure if you use the latest version of photoshop and XP they'll crunch your processor, but if you have an older system, say win2000 and an earlier version of photoshop 256 will work just fine.
I've been doing graphic work for quite some time now and I remember thinking how wonderful my (very expensive!)128mb/photoshop combination was when they were new.
There's too much hype regarding processor and RAM power. Sure you need power when you are working with 3d or large print format graphics, but for the most part you just don't need it. Especially considering most of the astro stuff we do is low res compared with say print work.
Oh, and be careful- choosing the right kind of RAM.
I'd have to say I dissagree!
If you want snappy performance from your computer you need to make sure that you are only using RAM and not using any swap space. On laptops this is even more important because laptops tend to have slower hard drives.
Being an uber-nerd I actually watch how much RAM and how much swap I am using all the time and I can tell you that on my home machine with 1GB of RAM my machine never has to page even when I'm messing round with graphics and images. My laptop only has 512 MB RAM and it starts paging if I do a lot of image processing at the same time or if I am doinging other things while processing images.
So, if you want good performance, 1GB is ideal, 512 is livable but any less than 512 on a new computer is just stupid because it will be obsolete in a few months! Right now 256 is under-speced so if you buy a machine with 256 you simply cannot expect it to last as it is already well behind the times before you even buyg it! To give you some idea of how obsolete 256MB is, Apple have stopped selling ANY computers with any less than 512MB. (BTW, the MacMini is an excellent little deal now that it comes with 512MB, same goes for the iBooks and PowerBooks).
Enjoy your new machines what ever it is you decide to get.
My Home Page - www.bartbusschots.ie
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- albertw
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- IFAS Secretary
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I paid 1,000 euro for the 350d slr I shopped around for a while most places where the same he trew in a 64mb and a 256mb but if you want to buy online you can for much cheaper try www.pixmania.com but be aware that if anything goes wrong you have to pay postage to send it back ,I bought it in the camera centre in tallaght also if buying online be aware of very good imitations maybe safe to buy from walk in shop
I got mine from pixmania not long ago, and have had no problems.
As for memory in a laptop, I recently bought a 1Gb stick for mine. 512Mb was just too slow to work with.
Cheers,
~Al
--
TZ=US/Pacific
Albert White MSc FRAS
Chairperson, International Dark Sky Association - Irish Section
www.darksky.ie/
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- morpock
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- Proto Star
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- Jed Glover
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- Main Sequence
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My main machine has 1Gb and I am currently considering upgrading to 2Gb to improve image processing perfromance.
Later,
Jed.
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- dpower
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Photoshop is one of the few programs that actually knows how to use RAM efficiently, and before you run off to buy more RAM you should ensure that photoshop is set up to use your memory efficiently.
As a rule of thumb, Photoshop wants to work with three to five times the size of a saved image file. This means that if you are working on a 15MB file (typical hi-res digital photo), you need to have 45 to 75MB free of both scratch disk space (hard drive space allocated to photoshop) and physical RAM.
If you have less scratch disk space than RAM, Photoshop will not use any more RAM than it has access to scratch disk space. Therefore, if you have 1GB of RAM and have assigned Photoshop 200MB of scratch disk space, Photoshop will use only 200MB of that huge RAM amount you have installed. Plus, photoshop prefers to have its own scratch disk, i.e.- you are better off buying another hard drive.
If anyone is interested I can go through the steps you need to take to ensure maximum efficiency, but the bottom line is that unless you are working with 10ft x 10ft photographs chances are you are buying RAM for no good reason.
IFAS web team
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- lionsden
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Actually, this goes for most computer resourses. If most background running programs and services (ie. the ones that are not needed) were stopped from running as default at boot up, processing speeds would increase noticably.
Leo @ Lionsden
Perhap because light travels faster than sound, some people appear bright until you hear them speak.
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