Photoshop 7: minimum effective RAM??

GD
Posted By
George_Durkee
Oct 18, 2007
Views
301
Replies
3
Status
Closed
Hi:

A friend of mine has an older Mac (PowerMac, 400 MHz w/768 RAM; 20 GB Hard Drive) with Photoshop 6. He’s a professional photographer and is, at long last, going digital. He can upgrade to a max of 1 GB RAM. I’ve got an almost as old Dell Inspiron 2500 notebook (800 MHz w/ 512 MB RAM — the maximum; and an 80 GB hard drive)and Photoshop 7 installed.

He just used a friend’s Canon ImagePrograf 6100 — he does a lot of large format printing — and was pretty impressed and will likely buy one.

So, the question is: which computer is better to use? I don’t need the Dell anymore (and have a separate license for CS2 on my other machine). He’s felt that his Mac runs pretty slow on large files. I’ve noticed no real problems on mine, but I don’t run large scanned files and don’t do anywhere near the manipulation he does.

Or is he better off just getting a new machine?

Hope that’s not too fuzzy a question.

Many thanks,

George

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PF
Peter_Figen
Oct 18, 2007
Yes, buy a new machine and upgrade to CS3. Put in as much ram as is affordable – preferably at least 4 gigs. The new machine will have faster ram, more ram, faster and larger hard drives and faster computing architecture. Anyone working with images professionally will appreciate the added speed. It will pay for itself in saved time alone.
JO
Jim_Oblak
Oct 18, 2007
RE: Mac…

One cannot upgrade to CS3 from Photoshop 6. If you buy a new Mac, you are pretty well obligated to buy a full license for Photoshop CS3 since version 6 does not qualify for upgrades to CS3.

The reason why one should buy CS3 with a new Mac is that the new Macs use Intel processors. CS2 and earlier do not run optimally on Intel because they must emulate the PPC processor. They work okay but if you want to get the most out of an Intel Mac, you will want a version of Photoshop written for it.

Your friend could easily find a used PPC processor-based Mac that would improve their situation greatly and still allow them to use Photoshop 6.

RE: PC…

Photoshop 7 can be upgraded to CS3 but there may be no need to upgrade. Versions 6 and 7 are still good tools and can run on XP.

RE: Mac vs PC…

The laptop does not seem to be much better than the Mac so a newer computer (even a used model) would be an improvement. New Macs and PCs use similar hardware now so there would be little difference in buying either. They just have different operating systems.
GD
George_Durkee
Oct 18, 2007
Peter & Jim:

Excellent answers on both.

Mucho thanks,

g.

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