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Hardware Requirements

Our business unit has approximately 40 Macintosh workstations for production and design work. Discussions are currently underway for making the switch to PC's. Since this discussion can be very passionate on both sides, I wanted to ask the User Group members who are currently doing production and design work on a PC, what are your baseline requirements for hardware? Processor speed? Memory? The current Macintosh users are heavy InDesign, Photoshop users with a large repository of historical Quark documents.

Any assistance, recommendations would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Connie Isley TAI Team Employee Technology Services

We run about about 25 stations, 20 of which are macs, our production dept uses newer G4's and G5 for heavy duty photopshop/illustrator quark work. We don't recommend less than 512 MB of ram per workstation(and some have 2 gig).

I don't recommend PC for design work (outside of web design) as there are too many font and other cross platform issues when sending to printers and working with outside designers/files.

Renee Gluckman IT Tech

We are strictly Macintosh. Are you looking to sell your Macs?

Billy Doherty Art Director

Don't do it.

-- Valerie Sexton Buzzsaw Advertising & Design

Connie,

I look forward to this discussion thread. By the wording of your original message you seem to understand that you are opening up the wrath of all wraths. Ever heard..."You will have to pry my MAC from my cold dead hands...", might have been used previously in the context of a gun.

Anyway, to answer you question, while we do indeed run MACS for most design work (this to is under discussion), we also have staff that uses the PC version. We are running Dells P4-2.0+ with 1 GIG RAM, 128 MEG AGP card. Also, we run the Adobe CS Suite. Runs great. Of course a MAC guy like me would never agree.

Let me know how things go with the discuss...

Kyle McAninch

My husband works in Page Assembly for a global publication printing company. Here is his recommendation.

For production and design work most people prefer Macs, but the cost of PC's makes them attractive for business owners.

We have 4 PC's for production work, and all of them have 2.0 GHz Pentium 4's with 256 MB of ram. I would prefer to have 512 MB.

We have several jobs that we run here that are created on PC's. The way we get around any font problems is by having the designers supply us with PDF's with the fonts embedded. They will work fine on either platform. Designers that use PC's usually send us any Mac ads that they receive from clients for us to convert to PDF's so they can place them. So, if they do decide to switch over to PC's, it would be wise to keep a couple of the MAC's around so they don't have to pay someone else to do it for them.

tracie rivett-smith

Dear Valerie,

I'm going to assume your large repository of historical Quark documents were created on your Macintosh workstations, and that much of your work is print-oriented. If that's largely correct, then compatibility's probably going to be at least somewhat of a problem. Maybe a very big problem. For at least three reasons.

First, there's file compatibility. If your existing Quark documents will continue to be edited, revised, etc., you'll be complicating your work substantially with cross-platform issues. If those Quark documents were built with mac fonts, very often the text will reflow on PCs even with the best font matching. Your images were probably created with mac previews and no file name suffixes like .eps, .tif, etc. and other "looser" Mac file naming conventions; so Quark (and perhaps InDesign) on the PC may not automatically link to them. You may have to edit and/or manually re-place the images. I recommend you find at least one business who's made this switch, preferably as much like your business as possible, and spend some time with them.

Second, there's print vendor compatibility. You'll need to make sure your print vendors will support your platform change. Because of file compatibility issues mentioned above, if you build it on a PC, they'll be better off to do their prepress work on a PC like yours. So talk to you print vendors. If the majority of your existing Quark documents use a small number of fonts and are "relatively simple" otherwise, that will help. Also, most printers now will work with pdf files for at least 1- and 2-color work; and some are going to a pdf workflow for 4-color as well. Print-quality pdfs are a different breed than the low resolution variety we see for reading online; and almost every printer will have different capabilities and requirements. So again, talk to your print vendors.

Third, and I'm really not joking, is employee compatibility. I believe switching from Mac to PC will be a bigger change for them than you might anticipate. 40 or more designers and production people switching platforms...wow. So, after talking with your print vendors, if switching is still in the running, I recommend you buy one or two PCs with all the right PC-version software, carefully choose a handful of your creative staff, and do a pilot project for at least a month or two.

Alan Waller

We also have 15-20 Macs in house.. If you are switching to PC with the thought process of saving money... (Which in system comparison PC is cheaper), you will end up spending more money in time, dealing with compatibility issues and output issues for the design and production dept. I know of two company's who have made this switch and went back to Mac in the creative dept, and left Accounting and PR on PC. If you have any questions please feel free to call.

Mike Vialpando Partner Estipona Vialpando Partners Marketing, Advertising, Public Relations