Parallels, XP & ThumbsPlus Performance

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I appreciate the help that's been given as I try to move away from using ThumbsPlus. The reality for me has set in that this one application and I have become very good friends and I am used to how it works. I am looking into Photoshop Elements but the learning curve once I get it will still be my hold back and ThumbsPlus still seems to handle things quicker.

I have already had Parallels & XP setup and seems to run fine. However when I open ThumbsPlus the time it takes to make the thumbnails is painfully slow. Then when working with a photo its slower then soup. I have 4GB of RAM now in my iMac and I've adjusted the memory allocation (I think correctly) to XP to 1GB. But it didn't seem to make any changes in the performance.

Can anyone offer some guidance or resources for getting this to speed up? Is it because I am opening and editing the images on my mac portion of the drive? Should I put them on the Windows portion?

Thanks!
 
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I would suggest an alternate approach. What are the major functions of ThumbsPlus that you really love? Perhaps you could post them here and we could help you find the Mac application that comes the closest to them? I too used to be a ThumbsPlus user on PC, but don't feel the need of it anymore on my Mac.

The best thing to do when you switch is REALLY switch. Throw off those Windows dependencies quite consciously and force yourself to do everything "the Mac way" for at least a month or so, until you overcome the "newness factor". Then you can make experienced choices as to whether you REALLY need any Windows apps.

After doing this myself when I switched, I ultimately found that the only Windows thing I really needed was ActiveX controls for web pages, and only because I frequent an investing web site that uses them. So, I keep a Windows box around for that purpose and that purpose only. Everything else I now do very nicely using native Mac apps. I bet you can too.
 
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y-guy,

Not sure it would help significantly, but I'd allocate 2 GB memory to Parallels. I use Paint Shop Pro in XP/Parallels with no or little trouble...

And I would work in the Windows environment...

Noel
 
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mac57 - thanks for your help. I have been playing with ImageWell enough in the past week that I find it can do what I need with the fewest steps, though I do miss the completeness that ThumbsPlus offered. The biggest challenge I faced was being able to crop a portion of a photo and keeping the photo in a 4:3 mode after the crop. TP made this pretty simple by selecting the general area to crop, then trimming to proportion. The mac software I'd tried, made this painfully awkward or required two different software programs. Imagewell is priced right an makes it pretty easy. I still want to try Elements but until I can demo it I don't want to shell out $70 to hope it does it right.

I've tried to avoid using windows, I held off installing it on my mac for 90 days but finally needed to use it for my GPS routing software.

Noels - thanks I tried that and it seem to help, I also have been copying the folders I need to work with on the desktop of windows and that seems to work. Between the two steps the speeds is much better when I need to use it.

My hope is that Cerious software considers making a native mac version of ThumbsPlus, searching the net I find a lot of people like me that really like the features it offers.
 
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I have to admit that if Cerious made a version of ThumbsPlus for the Mac, I would consider it too. It was one of my favorite PC graphics programs, right up there with the simpler IrfanView (Xee.app is a pretty good Mac equivalent though).

I agree that if I did not have Photoshop I would likely really miss software that would crop to a particular proportionate dimension set. That is a valuable function. I am glad that it is working out for you with ImageWell. It is a great little app, isn't it? It is too bad that it recently has become shareware. Until very recently most of its functions were available in a free version, with a few "extras" available if you paid more. These days, it is a "pay before you play" program unfortunately
 
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So far Imagewell is working ok, I have picked up a bit of resentment from users when they went to payware. The demo has worked well enough that I was able to test the features, though before I buy it I'll want to try out Photoshop elements to see how it handles the task I need.
 
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If you hunt around various repositories, you might yet be able to find one of the freeware versions. 3.4.1 is the last such version I am aware of, and is also the version I am running at this point. When I checked for upgrades and discovered that they had gone the "payware" route, I decided that no update was needed after all! :D

Check around, you may be able to still find 3.4.1 out there. It was released as freeware, so it is quite legal to use it as such.
 

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