Cable Modem Tweaks

By Jerry Pournelle

November 3, 2003

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Column 279 (Continued from the Previous Week)

Viewing and Editing Photos

I don't do a lot of photo editing, and what I do is mostly for my Web site (www.jerrypournelle.com). We do tend to fuss with photos of our grandchild, but they seldom need real editing. Mostly what I do with a photo editor is view the pictures, crop them somewhat, and collapse them into higher compression pictures for posting on my Web site.

Microsoft 2000 PhotoDraw was quite good enough for all that. I am sure there were better such programs out there, but PhotoDraw came with the Microsoft Office 2000 Pro suite, and since I install some kind of Office suite on nearly every machine I build, test, and use, using PhotoDraw made things a lot simpler, if for no other reason than I have licenses to do that for Office 2000 Pro.

The license issue, incidentally, can get sticky at Chaos Manor: We don't do formal reviews (22 Word Processors Compared in this issue!) here. I use the stuff I write about, and I use it hard and long so that I learn something about its strengths and weaknesses; and since, lately, hardware has been advancing much faster than software, it means I need to transfer software from machine to machine as I upgrade them. But since I have to make a living, I generally keep a couple of highly reliable machines around so I can be sure of getting my books, and the columns, out on time. And that means I have to ask for what amounts to unlimited transfer licenses for software I'm using. Microsoft has been very good about that, sometimes sending me a dozen copies of a program that requires activation. So have most software publishers—but not all of them. Some want lengthier negotiations than I'm ready for.

Anyway, I used PhotoDraw for years, but now it doesn't run on two of my "main" machines, and I've got to replace it.

The immediate candidates are JASC PaintShop and Painter, both of which I recall fondly from earlier times before PhotoDraw; Adobe's PhotoShop, which is the high end professional program but hard to learn; Adobe Elements; and a couple of others.

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