姥姥石窟

Recently my Macbook Pro needs to be send back and repair, since I get used to the Mac OS X for my day to day work and my company can’t provide me a Mac at this moment, so I bought a MSi Wind (U100) netbook at the early January, install Mac OS X on it so that it can be a temporary replacement for my MBP.

Thanks to the Atom processor and the extra 1G of memory (totally 2G now), my Wind can run a Windows 2003 server virtual machine in an acceptable speed while the VM is located in an external USB 2.0 3.5 inch hardisk. Of course its depends on what application you runs in the VM, but at least I feel its usable, others may think its painful, I have no objection at all…

I usually editing my digital photos files created by my Leica M8 and Fujifilm FinePix F100fd with Apple Aperture, they are in either RAW or Jpeg format. Dunno why after I transfered my OS X account on Wind with my MBP Time Machine backup, my aperture failed to startup, still no time to figure out what’s the problem is, and never try to reinstall it again, so now I can only use Adobe Bridge and Adobe Photoshop CS3 for image processing. Don’t expect you can open & edit lots of files at once and editing with lots of layers… else you are giving yourself a big punch only!!

The LED panel will be nice after calibration, but since its just a 10″ display, a 1024 x 600 resolution is used. And problem comes when opening a RAW file with Photoshop, following warning prompts.

Well, you can go ahead and choose yes actually, but you won’t be able to access some controls and all the buttons located at the bottom, that means you can’t make precise adjustment while shooting with RAW. Please let me know if you do have a RAW converter on Mac that can run under 800 x 600, will give you a big kiss!

Few days ago I checked out the MSi Wind user forum, found a way that allow me to choose 1024 x 768 resolution on my machine, I hope it can help to overcome this problem so just give it a try. After chosen to use that resolution, viewable area still displaying 1024 x 600, and I expect I can move the screen to the bottom part by moving my cursor to the bottom of the screen, unfortunately I’m wrong, it just can’t act like that… I suspect that its the display driver problem, and I’m looking forward someone to get it done soon!

A netbook is your good partner if you are a serious photographer who carries several camera bodies & lens to go shoot during a trip, or someone who needs a larger display to review their works instantly. A 10″ netbook is a lot smaller & lighter than normal 15″ laptop computer, save your energy for your creative mind!