Ultra Mobile PC Questions

darkdragon

Alright, i finally got a UMPC. I'm planning to use it for web browsing, photo viewing/storage on the road, notes/etc.

I want to install some sort of image editing software. I have read that the system isn't beefy enough for CS3, so I am considering Photoshop Elements. I use CS3 at home (Mac and PC) and laptop (Mac) so I thought familiarity and ability to go .psd -> .psd would be very helpful.

I don't plan on this to be my main machine. Just something I'll always carry with me and place to dump photos when my card fills up (if needed).

Here's some specs:

Windows XP Pro Tablet SP2
7" widescreen @ 800x480,800x600,1024x600
1GB RAM
60GB HDD
Pentium M 1GHz processor


I have never used Photoshop Elements. Do you think it would run smoothly for very light processes (sharppening, curves, crops) on images with these specs? Will the 7" screen be impossible (so far i've surfed the web on it and smugmug looks great at all resolutions).

Is there another option that would work on this little system?

Thanks for any help! :barb

mike.strock

darkdragon wrote:

Alright, i finally got a UMPC. I'm planning to use it for web browsing, photo viewing/storage on the road, notes/etc.

I want to install some sort of image editing software. I have read that the system isn't beefy enough for CS3, so I am considering Photoshop Elements. I use CS3 at home (Mac and PC) and laptop (Mac) so I thought familiarity and ability to go .psd -> .psd would be very helpful.

I don't plan on this to be my main machine. Just something I'll always carry with me and place to dump photos when my card fills up (if needed).

Here's some specs:

Windows XP Pro Tablet SP2
7" widescreen @ 800x480,800x600,1024x600
1GB RAM
60GB HDD
Pentium M 1GHz processor


I have never used Photoshop Elements. Do you think it would run smoothly for very light processes (sharppening, curves, crops) on images with these specs? Will the 7" screen be impossible (so far i've surfed the web on it and smugmug looks great at all resolutions).

Is there another option that would work on this little system?

Thanks for any help!

With that small a screen, I personally would be hard pressed to use it for anything other than a *very expensive* dropbox from offloading my photos while out in the field. That's just me personally, however.

You might look at the latest versions of ACDSee Photo Manager, I believe it is lightweight enough to run on that machine and has the abilities you are looking for.

http://www.acdsys.com/ I believe is the site or you can Google ACDSee .

Hope that helps.

Mike.

darkdragon

mike.strock wrote:

With that small a screen, I personally would be hard pressed to use it for anything other than a *very expensive* dropbox from offloading my photos while out in the field. That's just me personally, however.

You might look at the latest versions of ACDSee Photo Manager, I believe it is lightweight enough to run on that machine and has the abilities you are looking for.

http://www.acdsys.com/ I believe is the site or you can Google ACDSee .

Hope that helps.

Mike.

thanks for the suggestion Mike, i'm working with the trial right now and it is very cool.

mike.strock

darkdragon wrote:

thanks for the suggestion Mike, i'm working with the trial right now and it is very cool.

Hope it works for you Lisa.

Mike.

Richard

This sounds great for storing/previewing pics, but I would not trust such a small, lo-res screen for editing. There are many browser packages that will work well. Since you have XP-Pro, I would recommend installing Microsoft's power toy for professional photography, which adds support for RAW files to Explorer.

darkdragon

Richard wrote:

This sounds great for storing/previewing pics, but I would not trust such a small, lo-res screen for editing. There are many browser packages that will work well. Since you have XP-Pro, I would recommend installing Microsoft's power toy for professional photography, which adds support for RAW files to Explorer.

Hmm. Good idea, I'll look into the Power Toys.

Not planning on using it as my edit platform, just a "oh, what would this picture look like cropped, or b/w" etc. The screen isn't really low resolution, i can do 1024 with is decent. Its just small in inches

So far I'm trying ACDSee which runs very smooth but is SO different than Photoshop I dont know if it is going to work for me. Still wantt to try Elements on it but they aren't doing Trials on adobe software right now.

Richard

darkdragon wrote:

Hmm. Good idea, I'll look into the Power Toys.

Not planning on using it as my edit platform, just a "oh, what would this picture look like cropped, or b/w" etc. The screen isn't really low resolution, i can do 1024 with is decent. Its just small in inches

So far I'm trying ACDSee which runs very smooth but is SO different than Photoshop I dont know if it is going to work for me. Still wantt to try Elements on it but they aren't doing Trials on adobe software right now.

You might want to check out XnView. It's light-weight and free. In addition to browsing and slide shows, you can do simple editing (including crops), conversions and IPTC tagging with it. Warning: it's not terribly fast if you are using RAW files, but Jpg performance is fine. I used it instead of Bridge before the CS3 version came out and was quite happy with it for file maintenance tasks.

jziegler

You might even look at Picasa for some of the basic functions. It's free and relatively fast, supports RAW from many cameras, and does organization pretty well. It's aimed at the basic photo crowd, so it's not terribly powerful, but might do what you need here.

Pupator

Yeah, I'll 2nd Picassa.

For an in the field, 2nd computer, it's my app of choice. It's free, fast, and makes it easy to cull the good from the bad. I dump all my raw files on the mobile PC and let Picassa index them. Then I can go in and delete the bad ones, do some quick crops and touch-ups on the good ones, upload them to a gallery and take advantage of proof-delay to do real corrections when they get ordered.