The Way of the Johnny

I love photo and video editing on my Mac. For photography, iPhoto is a wonderful application I use for casual photos and Aperture 3 is what I use for my serious, professional quality photography. For video, iMovie is easy to use and can give great results. But we also have a netbook in the house ( Asus EeePC ) which runs Windows XP and it gets a lot more use than the Mac does. Between my wife's iPod Touch and the EeePC , she doesn't even use the Mac anymore. She also takes a bunch of photos and videos with her Canon Powershot SD1000. So, to me, it makes a lot of sense to dedicate the EeePC to my wife's photos and videos. It has a fairly big 160GB hard drive and has a decent screen. The question that comes up is: What software can I use on this low powered netbook for editing Sophia's photos and video? More specifically, is there free software out there that can come close to doing the same job as iPhoto and iMovie do on the Mac? I'm happy to say ...

Yesterday, I finished installing Windows 7 on my mom's computer. I upgraded my Macbook Pro with a SSD drive, so I took the old HDD , bought a 3.5" HDD enclosure adapter, and threw it in my mom's Dell Dimension E510 desktop computer with the intention of installing the Windows 7 RC on it. I'm very impressed with Windows 7 RC on my mom's desktop. Before I get into my list of observations, here's a short list of the E510 specs: -CPU: Intel Pentium D 2.80 GHz -RAM: 2.5 GB - HDD : 2.5", 120 GB, 5400 RPM -old HDD : 3.5", 80 GB, 7200 RPM -wireless network adapter: Netgear -Monitors: (1) 15", 4:3 ratio Dell connected via VGA and (1) 17", widescreen Dell connected via VGA to DVI port using adapter -Keyboard and mouse: wireless Logitech set with Dell label -Printer: Canon Pro9000 -Scanner: Epson -And various USB devices ( muli -card reader, 30 GB external HDD , etc.) As you can see from the specs, my mom's computer isn't the most pow...

I listen to Leo Laporte on the TWiT netcast network and lately he's been raving about Windows 7, so I decided to give it a test drive. I use VMWare Fusion my my Mac to run Windows XP, so it was a natural choice to try running the Windows 7 Release Candidate in a virtual machine. Fortunately, VMWare had a tutorial on their website on how to accomplish this, so I downloaded the 64-bit Windows 7 ISO, installed it in a virtual machine, an presto, I've got Windows 7 RC on my Mac. Following are my first impressions of the operating system. 1. Windows 7 feels snappier than XP. The fact that I'm using 64-bit Windows 7 compared to 32-bit Windows XP might be a factor in this. And I assume Windows 7 is better able to take advantage of the Mac's Core2Duo processor compared to XP. Whatever the factors are, it's really nice to see Microsoft improve the speed of Windows dramatically from Vista. 2. Windows 7 retains the same control panel structure as Vista. I don't u...

I downloaded the new Internet Explorer 8 last 2 weeks ago when it first came out so I could see what all the fuss was about. I had heard mixed review about IE8 and wanted to see for myself how it ran on my work desktop (3.2GHz P4 with 3 GB of RAM, Windows XP SP 3). Basically, here was my experience with IE8: it was slow and kept crashing. Truth be told, IE7 crashed on a daily basis for me and I was hoping IE8 would resolve this, but it didn't. IE8 was not only slower, but it slowed down my computer in general and crashed more often than IE7. I don't know what it does to the underpinning of Windows, but I noticed the graphical speed of Windows slowed down noticeably after installing IE8. What I mean by graphical speed is the minimizing, maximizing, and switching of windows, refreshing of the desktop, and other graphical animations of Windows. Did I mention IE8 crashes more often then IE7? This is not necessarily an IE8 problem, but more of a compatibility problem. The com...