I decided to copy all of the image files from the USB drive to the Firewire drive but half way through the copying process the Mac hung again. One re-boot later and it seemed I had copied a lot of the files but not all. With Windows if I drag a folder from one drive to another of the same name it will give a number of options but not so on the Mac it's either replace or stop. Maybe I am missing something.
So in trying to determine what was copied of the 10 or so main directories I used Command I to find out how big the folders were to ascertain if all files were copied, a cumbersome process. In Windows I can just roll the mouse over the folder and it will give me the size. In the end it was easier to simple copy all of the files again, I hope it's not going to crash again.
At the same time as I am doing this on the Mac I am moving files around on the various Windows PCs and across the network. Despite the fact that at times I have had over 20 copy windows open on my Vaio it has not uttered a murmur of complaint and has not crashed, in fact I can't remember the last time it crashed.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Lightroom Continued . . .
Restarted the Mac and restarted Lightroom and managed to get the files into Lightroom but then I got the pizza wheel of death and the computer died.
Restarted again and all seems to be well. so far
Restarted again and all seems to be well. so far
Lightroom
I have been using Lightroom on my Vaio for a long time. I have a bunch of small (they were big at the time) USB hard drives with tons of images on them. The Mac is THE machine for images and graphics, right? So I bought a new 500 Gbyte Firewire drive and decided to consolidate all of my images on the new drive using Lightroom (latest version).
So I connected the Firewire drive and the first of my USB drives and started a new catalogue in LR and proceeded to copy all of the images from the USB drive to the new Firewire drive. After 4 hours or so I figured out Lightroom was "not responding" tried force quit and the computer completely hung I had to do a hard restart. Still trying to copy the files . . .
So I connected the Firewire drive and the first of my USB drives and started a new catalogue in LR and proceeded to copy all of the images from the USB drive to the new Firewire drive. After 4 hours or so I figured out Lightroom was "not responding" tried force quit and the computer completely hung I had to do a hard restart. Still trying to copy the files . . .
Friday, April 23, 2010
Network Printing
I am sure this is a time out issue but today when I try to print to our Epson 11880 network printer it sends for some time and then just stops. The file is 593 Mbytes but I have NEVER had a problem printing from any of the 5 various Windows PC's.
Frustration grows ...
Frustration grows ...
File Sharing Nightmares
Oh the fun continues. So I have copied a couple of files to the desktop of the Mac and I cannot copy them to a network drive no matter what access rights are set.
I found a ton of information on the web about this problem but most of the suggestions suggest I open a terminal window and use UNIX command lines.
There WAS a reason I stopped using MSDOS about a million years ago, I don't really want to go back to a command line interface...
I found a ton of information on the web about this problem but most of the suggestions suggest I open a terminal window and use UNIX command lines.
There WAS a reason I stopped using MSDOS about a million years ago, I don't really want to go back to a command line interface...
Saturday, April 17, 2010
Most Expensive mouse I have ever bought
My frustrations with the mouse were getting too much to bear today, as a heavy Photoshop user I need the mouse to be very fast and very accurate. The the track pad, while excellent, was not up to the task and the Microsoft wireless mouse had started to jitter. So off to Best Buy and I purchased a Magic Mouse - $70 plus tax (thankfully I am a member of Best Buy rewards and I had $15 of certificates but still $70 for a mouse!
As usual with Apple products it is a thing of beauty... and functional as well. Took a few minutes to set up but I really like it. Now whether it is any more functional than the Microsoft Wireless Mouse 4000 which I use on the Vaio is another question.
As usual with Apple products it is a thing of beauty... and functional as well. Took a few minutes to set up but I really like it. Now whether it is any more functional than the Microsoft Wireless Mouse 4000 which I use on the Vaio is another question.
Network Problems Solved
So after reading a lot of on-line posts I seem to have sorted out two of the major problems I had, speed of Internet access and speed of Ethernet access.
The Internet access problems were solved by opening system preferences - network - advanced - Ethernet and then configuring it manually and setting the speed to 1000BaseT and duplex to full or dull-duplex, flow control (did not seem to make any difference which one was chosen).
The Ethernet connection was a little more difficult to solve, it was taking a full 50 second to move a 50 Mbyte file, it was way faster using wireless. But this was solved by changing SP4 configuration to manual and setting the IP address to the same address as the wireless. The same file now downloads in less than 5 seconds.
But hang on isn't changing from a Windows system to a Mac system supposed to be easy. How many people know what an IP address is, let alone how to change it.
The Internet access problems were solved by opening system preferences - network - advanced - Ethernet and then configuring it manually and setting the speed to 1000BaseT and duplex to full or dull-duplex, flow control (did not seem to make any difference which one was chosen).
The Ethernet connection was a little more difficult to solve, it was taking a full 50 second to move a 50 Mbyte file, it was way faster using wireless. But this was solved by changing SP4 configuration to manual and setting the IP address to the same address as the wireless. The same file now downloads in less than 5 seconds.
But hang on isn't changing from a Windows system to a Mac system supposed to be easy. How many people know what an IP address is, let alone how to change it.
Internet Speeds
Just tested the relative speeds over the internet between my old Vaio (see previous posts for specs) compared to the new Macbook Pro.
Best of three
Macbook Pro - Fastest Ping .39 - Fastest DL 5.03 - Fastest UL - 0.73
Macbook Pro - Slowest Ping .41 - Slowest DL 1.4 - Slowest UL - 0.73
Sony Vaio - Fastest Ping .26 - Fastest DL 6.57 - Fastest UL o.73
Sony Vaio - Slowest Ping .42 - Slowest DL 6.55 - Slowest UL 0.73
I am going to check to see if there are any settings on the Mac that I am missing
I also added a Microsoft mouse to the Mac which worked OK until I tried adding another monitor and then it started jittering.
The second monitor I added was an LG which has an identical resolution to the Mac which set up seamlessly and seems to be working fine. I have also color calibrated both monitors on the Mac and the Vaio to see if there they all look the same. I am using a Color Munki from X-Rite.
They don't . . . but they are pretty close.
Best of three
Macbook Pro - Fastest Ping .39 - Fastest DL 5.03 - Fastest UL - 0.73
Macbook Pro - Slowest Ping .41 - Slowest DL 1.4 - Slowest UL - 0.73
Sony Vaio - Fastest Ping .26 - Fastest DL 6.57 - Fastest UL o.73
Sony Vaio - Slowest Ping .42 - Slowest DL 6.55 - Slowest UL 0.73
I am going to check to see if there are any settings on the Mac that I am missing
I also added a Microsoft mouse to the Mac which worked OK until I tried adding another monitor and then it started jittering.
The second monitor I added was an LG which has an identical resolution to the Mac which set up seamlessly and seems to be working fine. I have also color calibrated both monitors on the Mac and the Vaio to see if there they all look the same. I am using a Color Munki from X-Rite.
They don't . . . but they are pretty close.
Friday, April 16, 2010
Easy to use?
Still can't find out how to connect to the Windows printers, tried many searching in google but none of the suggestions worked so I have given up for now. Now just using the Macbook Pro for Photoshop work.
While I like the track pad it's not really that good for Photoshop so I have attached a Mac mouse to the computer, I really hate the way the mouse works so I am going to try and find another mouse.
Just tried opening a large file in Photoshop and it crashed, I am trying a complete re-boot and I'll see what happens.
While I like the track pad it's not really that good for Photoshop so I have attached a Mac mouse to the computer, I really hate the way the mouse works so I am going to try and find another mouse.
Just tried opening a large file in Photoshop and it crashed, I am trying a complete re-boot and I'll see what happens.
The Second Day
Today I needed to start printing, I had two jobs to run, one to the Epson 11880 and one to one of the Epson 9800's.
I downloaded the 11880 driver and it installed quickly and seemingly cleanly. I cannot find any of the Windows shared printers so I have given up on that and ran that job from an aging XP machine.
The file I prepped for the 11880 was around 500 Gbytes, not an unusual size for us to print.
I sent the file to the printer and . . . nothing happened for a long time, maybe 20 minutes, the famous pizza wheel of death spinning . . .
I stopped the job, checked the print queue (nothing there), restarted Photoshop and tried again, this time after 5 or so minutes Photoshop came back to life and everything indicated that the job had been sent and should be running but no. Again nothing in the print queue.
I don't have time for this so I printed it from my Vaio.
One possitive note, I have an HP 6210 which I connected to the Macbook Pro and after a couple of minutes setting it up it works great, no scanning features but doing a new install on a Window machine takes forever...
I downloaded the 11880 driver and it installed quickly and seemingly cleanly. I cannot find any of the Windows shared printers so I have given up on that and ran that job from an aging XP machine.
The file I prepped for the 11880 was around 500 Gbytes, not an unusual size for us to print.
I sent the file to the printer and . . . nothing happened for a long time, maybe 20 minutes, the famous pizza wheel of death spinning . . .
I stopped the job, checked the print queue (nothing there), restarted Photoshop and tried again, this time after 5 or so minutes Photoshop came back to life and everything indicated that the job had been sent and should be running but no. Again nothing in the print queue.
I don't have time for this so I printed it from my Vaio.
One possitive note, I have an HP 6210 which I connected to the Macbook Pro and after a couple of minutes setting it up it works great, no scanning features but doing a new install on a Window machine takes forever...
The First REAL day of Work
The first problems I have encoutered is connecting the computer to our network. We have what can best be described as a peer to peer network. We have two RAID NAS (Network Attatched Storage) devices, one has two USB drives attached as back-up and then all of the Windows machines can also act as servers. One of them has two 1.5 TB shared drives connected via USB and another has a BluRay BDROM which we use as a seconday backup.
One of the printers (a 64" Epson 11880) has an ethernet port and the others are connected to Windows computers which act as print servers.
The first problem I encoutered was trying to connect to the network drives, only one NAS drive showed up and none of the Windows shared drives. After screwing around a bit I found that I could force the Mac to recognize them by using smb://drivename this allowed me to connect and it seems to work fine although whenever I try to access the drives through Photoshop a window opens for no apparent reason and I have to close it to get back to Photoshop.
The network access seemed very slow - much slower than my Vaio working wirelessly - so I hardwired the computer and it got a little faster.
Photoshop seems to run well and it's quite fast but nothing to write home about and certainly no faster than my old Core i7 desktop.
One of the printers (a 64" Epson 11880) has an ethernet port and the others are connected to Windows computers which act as print servers.
The first problem I encoutered was trying to connect to the network drives, only one NAS drive showed up and none of the Windows shared drives. After screwing around a bit I found that I could force the Mac to recognize them by using smb://drivename this allowed me to connect and it seems to work fine although whenever I try to access the drives through Photoshop a window opens for no apparent reason and I have to close it to get back to Photoshop.
The network access seemed very slow - much slower than my Vaio working wirelessly - so I hardwired the computer and it got a little faster.
Photoshop seems to run well and it's quite fast but nothing to write home about and certainly no faster than my old Core i7 desktop.
Turning it on!
Back at home with my new toy I had it set-up, connected to my wireless network, and running in a few minutes. I installed Photoshop, color calibration software and Open Office ready for the real test, working in the studio the next day.
So far so good, it starts up much faster than my Windows system and after a little work I began to really like the touch pad controls, especially the two finger scrolling.
So far so good, it starts up much faster than my Windows system and after a little work I began to really like the touch pad controls, especially the two finger scrolling.
The Shopping Experience
I arrived at the Apple store at 7 p.m. and left some 10 minutes later laptop in hand. Despite the fact that the store was packed I managed to get a sales person and he sold me the computer all with a few clicks of his iTouch, no hard copy of the receipt, it was e-mailed to me... very cool, this surely must be the shape of shopping to come.
The Beginning - Background
OK so I am a hard core PC user and have been since the very first GUI for Intel based PC's, the excellent GEM system.
I run a fine art digital printmaking business, we have four large format printers which are mostly driven by Windows XP, Vista and 7 systems. We use Photoshop extensively again on Windows based machines, Core duo and Core i7 systems. In the studio we also have an Intel based iMac (Leopard) and an older Mac running system 9 (which we have to run so that we can still run our SCSI based scanner).
My personal computer is (was) an HP Core i7 with 6 Gbytes of RAM and my laptop an older Sony Vaio (VGN-CR220E - Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T7250 @ 2.00GHz with 4 Gbytes of RAM).
So… I decided about a month ago that we needed a new computer in the studio so I decided to keep my Sony Vaio to run accounts and stuff and get a Macbook Pro as my “main” computer to run Photoshop and print from. I knew that a new model was imminent so I waited and on the very day they announced the new models I rushed down to the excellent Apple store in Delaware and purchased a brand new shiny MacBook Pro 15” Core i5 model. As we work pretty much exclusively with artists I could only afford the $1,799 model, which, incidentally, is probably twice what I could have bought the equivalend Windows based laptop.
I run a fine art digital printmaking business, we have four large format printers which are mostly driven by Windows XP, Vista and 7 systems. We use Photoshop extensively again on Windows based machines, Core duo and Core i7 systems. In the studio we also have an Intel based iMac (Leopard) and an older Mac running system 9 (which we have to run so that we can still run our SCSI based scanner).
My personal computer is (was) an HP Core i7 with 6 Gbytes of RAM and my laptop an older Sony Vaio (VGN-CR220E - Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T7250 @ 2.00GHz with 4 Gbytes of RAM).
So… I decided about a month ago that we needed a new computer in the studio so I decided to keep my Sony Vaio to run accounts and stuff and get a Macbook Pro as my “main” computer to run Photoshop and print from. I knew that a new model was imminent so I waited and on the very day they announced the new models I rushed down to the excellent Apple store in Delaware and purchased a brand new shiny MacBook Pro 15” Core i5 model. As we work pretty much exclusively with artists I could only afford the $1,799 model, which, incidentally, is probably twice what I could have bought the equivalend Windows based laptop.
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