Expert: Glen Demers - 2/28/2010

Question
I shoot advertising photography, and have used a Mac G5 for several years.  I use Adobe Photoshop 5.0 and Photoshop Elements 3.  My system isn't compatible for higher versions.  I'm at the point where I use a PC at work for advertising proposals and such, and my mac at home for the photos.  I would like to get a new computer for home that would do both, and that I can use updated versions of Photoshop or elements with.  Would a PC run the versions just as well as a Mac would? Its like 1/2 the price...at least!

Answer
Hi Donna,

You can run Adobe products on a PC and they look the same as the mac versions although the keyboards shortcuts are different.

Rather than buy a PC, I would recommend upgrading your Mac system to 10.4 Tiger or 10.5 Leopard. Either of these will accommodate the latest Adobe releases and cost considerably less than a PC.

If you just want new hardware, all the new Macs, including the mini, come with Intel processors and you can run both platforms on a single machine. My mac mini at home runs OSX 10.4 and Windows XP, although since I downloaded Neo-Office, an open source office application for Mac OSX, I can't remember the last time I booted up in PC mode.

As far as performance, I can't say. I don't use a PC for Photoshop work at all. Even when working in Quark or InDesign on the PC, I will still do Photoshop on the mac and copy to the PC when I'm done. It has been my experience that, for the average user, macs will operate longer. I still have a G4 running with Photoshop 7. Macs seem to accept upgrades to system or applications easier than PC's, with PC's becoming obsolete after a few years due to incompatibilities or problematic transitions to newer software.

Hope this helps,
Glen Demers
Adobe Certified Expert, Photoshop 7
Prepress Technician, Best Printing Online
www.bestprintingonline.com

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