Professional Graphics Design and Printing

RoRo_4

We have a small design and print company, at present we run a Dell pc with 2gig ram, with Photoshop and a proper printing package that allows nesting. Some of the images are up to 36" x 36" with high definition and so take up lots of space. The printer needs to run for as long as possible so we have to set up long print runs , photoshop runs alongside this. We often have to wait ages for photoshop to resize, load images which obviously is not very productive.

Looking to the future is it best to get two dedicated pcs, or should we move to Macs. If we had 2 computers what would be the best method of sharing these large files. Obviously price is an issue as well as performance. We have other PCs for office work so the old Mac/pc arguements are not important.

Many thanks in advance for any advice

I'm_With_Stupid

RoRo wrote: »

Looking to the future is it best to get two dedicated pcs, or should we move to Macs. If we had 2 computers what would be the best method of sharing these large files. Obviously price is an issue as well as performance. We have other PCs for office work so the old Mac/pc arguements are not important.

I don't think sharing them should be an issue. Someone might correct me, but I would reckon it's as simple as having a network port in each computer and linking them that way, so they can access each other's hard drive. The older network cards run at 100MB/Sec, but the latest generation transfer at 1GB/Sec, so I wouldn't see a problem with accessing very large files over the network.

The other thing you can do, which a lot of video editors do, is to think about the hard drives you have in the computer. Since hard drives are ten a penny nowadays, you can afford to have a dedicated storage drive in the computers (so that your computer isn't clogged up with huge saved files, slowing down the hard drive you're working on). My computer is also set up with two hard drives as a striped RAID array, which means that the hard drives share the workload effectively making them into a much faster single hard drive. Most video editing machines have a small boot drive with Windows and all your programs on, a really fast capture drive, where you capture your video clips to, and work on them, and a seperate storage drive. They are similar tasks in that they both need you to constantly modify huge files, so it might be something to look at.

And I'm pretty sure all of these things can be done on a Mac too, if you decide to go that route instead.

wakandem

As stated above , it should not be a problem sharing 2 pc's. Also agree with the addition of hard drives not only to have large files on one but to share out the paging files as xp defaults to only using C: . You can also back up on both pc's so if one dies you can still work. I am not sure about mac's - idon't know them. most people who have them rave about them but that might be to make themselves feel better about the cost.

chaddy7604

We don't rave about Mac's to justify the high cost. It's just that they do their job better than PC's just ask any design house what they prefer. I think you already know the answer.:beer:

I'm_With_Stupid

Personally I'd say unless you can think of a particular reason why you need to switch over to a Mac, stick with the PC. You're used to it, and Photoshop is the same program whatever you're running it on. I find that most of the arguments for switching to a Mac over a PC tend to come down to personal preference, and vice-versa.