Laptops and Notebooks

Ahhh – well in that case, you need an “Ultra Mobile PC“

I’ve seen them for about £700, which is quite reasonable for the power and portability, and their diminutive size.

Do a UK Google search for UMPC or Ultra Mobile PC.

This Link migt work!

Cheers for that chaps.

Just looking for something lightweight to take abroad on foreign trips and slip into my LowePro Compu Trekker AW.

Yes, there are many professionals who do image processing using Macs (that is hardware designed and built to Apple’s specifications, running a MAC Operating System (ie OSX)). But if you’re only editing photographs it is somewhat more expensive and generally unnecessary even for photography professionals.

They are generally employed for professional image rendering, though – that is desktop publishing, technical drawings & animation or artwork rendering.

The real professionals, that do real heavy duty artwork or simulation realtime rendering (like CGI for video and films or professional, motion, cockpit & control accurate simulators (ie F1 car, aircraft or ships) – are actually more likely to use Silicon Graphics hardware – they would thus have SG’s version of UNIX/linux installed. And programs – whilst off the shelf packages are available – tend to be written as a bespoke application suite.

For most photographic image manipulation you will find little difference in terms of end product quality (in fact I doubt there would be any difference at all) between operating systems and/or applications installed on a properly specified computer.

I’m not going to recommend what you should have, or not have, but PCs can run any one of a number of version of Linux. There are several different distribution packages, including hundreds of different applications, that can be downloaded and installed with a free to use licence absolutely free of charge. The “GIMP” image editing package is also free to download and use – and if you need a Microsoft compatible Office Suite, OpenOffice is also free to download and use!

Linux is a difficult OS to discribe because of the differences in packaged applications. There are even different versions of the desktop software, each with their own little quirks and differences. So unlike Windows you don’t have to use the same desktop – I’m saying it is a fundamental difference – not simply a different collection of icons and images.

Windows PCs have the majority of popular programs available, and you have to pay for many of them, but the Gimp for Windows is also “open source” and therefore free to download and use. And you can also download and install the same OpenOffice program, again, free of charge to use.

I’m not aware of any “Open Source” programs for Apple Macs – there is bound to be some, but I haven’t researched that – being a Windows XP Home/Pro, SuSE Linux and Novell NetWare (Small Business Suite) user. Indeed, I hold a couple of Novell qualifications.

(Don’t be confused with my Novell Small Business Suite reference – it is a suite of Novell’s fileserver networking tools – Netware OS, GroupWise eMail, etc…)

The bottom line is that editing photographs isn’t a terribly taxing job for any modern computer – get whatever you like best – got to a few shops and research what’s available, how they work and what you find most comfortable with.

Incidentally, most Linux OSs (yes there are several different “distributions” 😮 ) can be a bit …errrr… “challenging” for none technical types.

So, in precise, I would say – MAC or a support Unix/Linux OS for professionals; Linux for a low cost, but technically challenging (and superior in many respects), computer OS; Windows if you’re happy contributing to Uncle Bill’s charities, have used it previously and are happy with it.

With whatever you eventually chose, make sure you are either confident in your abilities to distinguish what constitutes a hardware problem or software configuration/bugs, or have access to a support guy who knows what he’s talking about with reference to your particular choice.

(Sorry it’s such a long answer – I got carried away a bit, and have probably only served to confuse you even more.)

Mac OS is a different look and feel than that of your Win OS (I assume) that you have been using. It is a bit more intuitive in it’s setup and once you are used to it’s setup, it is a cleaner interface. But, if you insist on using your WindowsOS and apps, you can run those on your Mac as well using a program called Parallels. This will let you run either on the same machine.