The reason your PowerBook takes so long to complete operations isn't
that it's a memory hog. It is because the hard drive in your laptop
is slow. iPhoto is a fairly disk-intensive application. Most laptop
drives until the very latest series PowerBooks and iBooks are 4200rpm
devices with a limited data transfer rate. I replaced the original
10G hard drive in my PowerBook G3/500Mhz, which only has 640M of RAM
installed, with a 7200rpm drive ... overall system operations/iPhoto
are at least 2x-3x faster now, with the same amount of RAM.
BTW, a nine-fan Power Mac G5 DP tower is generally as quiet as or
quieter than an iMac or PowerBook when the fan is running. The
thermal sensors and airflow management in the G5 tower is amazingly
efficient and the fans are virtually silent unless you are pushing
the cpu to its limits and it needs to shed a LOT of heat.
Graphic Converter is very fast because it does nearly all of its
image processing in RAM, very little swapping to the hard drive
unless an explicit Save operation is called. It supports Pentax PEF
files because it uses the dcraw source library in its implementation,
which Apple does not (or uses a subset). But Graphic Converter is far
from a "newbie - easy to use - do most things automagically"
application, in my opinion. It's the next step after iPhoto for
someone who is getting more interested in image editing.
Godfrey
On Oct 22, 2005, at 8:43 AM, Bertil Holmberg wrote:
This is exactly what I meant when I said iPhoto is a memory hog. It
takes my 1GHz 1GB PB a minut of hard disk activety to recover after
a photo editing session with iPhoto and PS. And that's a long time
to wait when you just want to go back to your email. Sure, I could
use a Power Mac, but I don't want a nine fan windtunnel in my bedroom.
Regrettable, the Pentax RAW software is even slower. It is unusable
for all practical purposes. I shudder when I think of the next gen
of 8MP+ cameras. Now, a shareware program such as Graphic Converter
not only opens Pentax RAW images when Apple can't (or won't), it
does so much faster than the Pentax software. Go figure...
Bertil
I find it adequate for simple photo management. I find it completely
doggy on my 1.4gig Powerbook with a gig of RAM if I try to use it to
edit photos. It's quicker to launch CS2 once (with the inevitable
wait for everything to load) and then double-click on each photo in
turn to load it up for editing.
