The orchid garden in the Singapore airport
I mentioned in a previous post that I had purchased a Netbook computer to use in my travels in place of my trusty MacBook Pro. I am happy to report that I am really pleased that I made the purchase. Before I left home, I loaded my new Netbook with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom so that I could process images from my travels. I also threw a bunch of movies on the hard drive to get me through some of the longer flight segments and layovers (like the 6 hours I spent in Singapore). Although I would probably have preferred to have my Netbook loaded with Windows XP instead of Vista, I am pretty happy with the performance so far. The movie playback has been very smooth using VLC as my viewer of choice. It’s a free program that will show almost any format out there. I really didn’t have a choice since the Windows Media Player doesn’t come with many Codecs and some of my video files are in DVD format so I would have had to pay for a codec to watch them (way to go, Microsoft).
The wi-fi has been great whenever I have been in range of a free connection. The built in antennae has been getting decent reception and my only limitation is the speed of the connection. It really is perfect for email and web surfing. Speaking of web surfing, I passed over the clumsy Internet Explorer 8 for Vista and opted to use Google Chrome. It was fairly new to me since it is not yet available for the Mac but I have to say that I am very pleased with the speed and user interface. It doesn’t have all of the add-ons that I am used to in Firefox but it is satisfying my need for quick web browsing.
I’m sure that the big question that most of you have is, how does my Netbook handle Lightroom. Frankly I was a bit skeptical when I installed it, especially since my Netbook, like most Netbooks, uses the Intel Atom processor. I am happy to report that, after importing a couple of hundred images, the Lightroom performance is actually much better than I had hoped for. Sure, it’s no where near as fast as my Mac, but I didn’t expect it to be. It does however allow me to upload with relative speed and moving between the different modules is pretty painless. I think it does help that I purchased the Acer with 2GB of RAM instead of the standard 1GB that most Netbooks have. I am also pleased that I opted for the 250 GB hard drive so that I can store a ton of RAW images without concern. I will transfer these to my Drobo when I get back home and then import them into my Lightroom catalog on my Mac for regular use. I probably should have brought along my Epson P5000 or a small back-up drive but I was really trying to cut down on my carry-on equipment. I did bring lots of CF cards so I probably won’t have to delete any of them before my trip is over.
Speaking of Lightroom, I was reading my buddy Scott Kelby’s blog and saw that Adobe has released the Beta for Lightroom 3. As soon as I finish writing this post I am going to head over to Adobe and download a copy for my Acer. I have heard that the import process has been upgraded and that imports are even faster now so I will be looking to this speed boost, especially since I will be doing a lot of shooting this weekend, starting with a night shoot in downtown Kuala Lumpur and the Petronas Towers tomorrow night. I will hopefully have a lot of images to post for you next week. Until then, check out the NAPP Lightroom 3 Beta Learning Center and then download your copy of the Lightroom 3 Beta over at the Adobe Labs.
Have a great weekend!
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