sundries

[rm]

What my mother had for me did turn out to be money from my grandfather's estate. Not a huge amount, but enough that I can buy a new computer, which I've needed to do for at least a year, and definitely go to Britain with Patty (Cardiff!) in April and then put the rest responsibly into savings.

All of which means I need to make some computer decisions. I have no idea what I want, but I'd like to do this before Dragon*Con. There are pros and cons to both Macs and PCs for me (I'm only looking at laptops btw). Uses are Intnernet and word processing mainly. Needs to not get cranky about things like PowerPoint and Photoshop, and if it's a PC has to run Access (don't ask) well. If it wouldn't kick the price too much higher, video editing capabilities are of potential interest. Ideally wanting to spend around $1300 or less, but willing to go higher for some random convincing reason.

My father's self-publishing "empire" continues apace. But, he's decided to do a book of all these vintage pinup photos he's collected from 1910, and I told him, yes, I can help promote that! So maybe my father finally has a good plan. He's also doing a book of his photography -- it's 50 years of New York City stuff, and he's got a good eye, so that might be something I'm willing to help him out with too.

We talked about Mad Men a bit. My father's first job was at BBD&O in 1955 and he worked at J. Walter Thompson during the era of Ehrlichman and has some pretty chilling stories about all of that. He was shocked by how much I remember of Madison Avenue from my childhood. It was pretty interesting, and he should be racing to write this stuff down, not all this other stuff he works on.

I finished the essay -- an hour and a half late, but hopefully the editor will be forgiving.

Comments

[weirdquark]

I think Macs tend to be better for video editing and come with a bunch of software with the pre-installed package. I've never used any of the video editing stuff on mine, so I don't know how easy/good it is. As far as I can tell, iMovie is designed for people who want to take their home video footage and put it together with music, so it may not quite be what you want. I have used Garage Band to edit music my a cappella group does and it has some features that are kind of neat and other features that I hate. I'll bet iMovie is the same way.

I have Microsoft Office on my MacBook and everything (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) works fine, although Excel has this weird thing where instead of clicking in a cell and being able to add to whatever is already there, you have to delete old content and re-enter all of the new content. (Unless there's some way to change that that I haven't found yet.) You'll need to check on whether word processing comes with the standard software package -- my old Mac had some Mac word processing software, my current one came with a trial version of Word and nothing else, so in order to continue to have word processing, I had to get Office separately. If that's still true, that's an additional cost factor.

You can get Photoshop for a Mac -- I don't have it, so I can't tell you whether it gets cranky or not -- however, Macs don't come with Paint or anything similar, so if you want to edit image files, you'll need to get it separately.

If you want to get into video editing, you'll be wanting a bigger monitor, which will kick the price higher. This is not so much an argument for spending more money, but you'll have to think about whether getting a bigger monitor is worth the higher price.

In short: Macs come with free video and music editing capabilities and no word processing. WTF, Apple?

[tearsinger.livejournal.com]

Double click in the box to add to it. It took me forever to get used to this.

Photoshop is great on the Mac. I use Gimp because it is free and similar.

[weirdquark]

Ah ha! I knew there was some trick I was missing. Thanks!