Using a mac laptop and windows desktop, what issues would I have

I have an i7 920 build running windows 7, might overclock it soon from 2.66 to somewhere around 3.5ghz. This thing is fast, 6gb ddr3, probably going to also get a SSD soon. I like windows 7 and have no intentions of getting rid of this workhorse anytime soon.

But, I currently have a lenovo t60 as my laptop. It's a piece of crap, by today's standards. A bit over 4 years old now, still with 1gb ram, etc. I don't want to sink any money into it but am looking to get a macbook air instead. I like the mac os, and really like the build quality and design of the new air.

So I have a few questions:

1. Would a new macbook air with 1.86GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 4gb of ram (I would probably upgrade RAM on my own, not through apple) be sufficient for editing in lightroom 3? I have realistic expectations, I'm not expecting an incredibly powerful computer but I have heard good things and benchmarks, and think this would be fine. Can anyone comment who has a similar setup?

2. On apple's site it says 4gb maximum - why? Is the amount of RAM limited by the OS or is this just the maximum apple will upgrade in house? Can I put 2x4gb sticks in the macbook air myself?

3. Besides software licensing, what issues am I going to run into using two computers like this? Keep in mind, if I do a bunch of editing on the road I am going to want to sync this up to my desktop. I was thinking about using an external hard drive to do so, or possibly dropbox to sync the lightroom catalog. Either way I need it so that when I update photos on my laptop, the changes are synced to my desktop, and if this could be automated I would be very happy. This is currently one of the biggest issues I have with using two computers, but dropbox has been very helpful with this. If I use an external, is the formatting going to be a problem? Will windows recognize the mac's external and vice versa?

4. What other issues should I expect? I am very good with computers, so finding my way around the OS and all that will not be an issue, but are there compatibility things I'm overlooking?

Thanks

I'm not even sure if ram on the new airs is even user upgradeable. I read somewhere that it is actually soldiered to the motherboard. If you go to the 2 big 3rd party suppliers, Crucial and OWC, you won't even find the air listed. For an external drive to be accessed by both machines it is either going to have to be formatted as Fat32, or you will have to get a NTFS plugin for the air.

crn3371 wrote in post #11277408
I'm not even sure if ram on the new airs is even user upgradeable. I read somewhere that it is actually soldiered to the motherboard. If you go to the 2 big 3rd party suppliers, Crucial and OWC, you won't even find the air listed. For an external drive to be accessed by both machines it is either going to have to be formatted as Fat32, or you will have to get a NTFS plugin for the air.

Interesting... I'll look into that. Now that you mention that I think I remember reading something saying that, only the hard drives were replaceable.

In any case, assume an air with 4gb of ram. If I have to pay apple for it oh well.

Following up on the external drive issue, aside from using the right fat32/NTFS format, you will just need to have a strategy for moving from one system to the other.

Having your image library on the external is no problem, but I keep may catalog/previews folder on my internal drive as well as the image chach shared by Lightroom and Photoshop Camera Raw for the Edit module and 1:1 previews. This keeps the speed performance up for the Library and Editing module, although in some things it will be slower than accessing things directly on the external drive.

What this does, though, is challenge your ability to move the catalog from working on your Mac to working on your PC. There are three approaches. The "straightforward Lightroom approach" is to do a File/Export as Catalog operation, putting the exported catalog onto the external drive so you can do a File/Import from Catalog on your desktop. Another more "direct" approach would be to copy your Catalog folder onto the external when you are ready to switch systems, then you can copy it onto the next system (overwrite the old one) and you are up and running. The third method will copy most of the image settings (editing and keywords at least) but not things like Lightroom collections and certain things like the Pick/Reject flags. This approach is good to know though because it makes that metadata available to other apps, especially Photoshop and, I've heard, Aperture. This is using the Lightroom Metadata/Save Metadata to File operation, and then the Read Metadata from File in the next system.

tonylong,

What about using dropbox to sync collections? Could this somehow be achieved?

I'm not a Mac user and have no knowledge of Dropbox. But, when you refer to collections, I assume you are referring to Lightroom collections and those are not addessible to any outside software -- they are in the Lightroom internal database. As I said above, you can copy the Catalog driver over to the external drive (and I'd also set the Lightroom Catalog preference to back up the Catalog to the external drive just to save your internal drives from being cluttered.

The MacBook Air's RAM is soldered to the system. Whatever you order from Apple is what you've got, forever. The OS itself can handle many times that amount of memory; Apple sells systems running 10.6 with up to 32GB.

For comparison, my 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook w/ 4GB RAM handles Aperture (Apple's competitor to LR) adequately, but I really feel like I'm outgrowing it. It's not a speed demon and heavy edits can take quite upwards of 30 seconds. The next one will definitely be a 15" MBP.

crn3371 wrote in post #11277408
I'm not even sure if ram on the new airs is even user upgradeable. I read somewhere that it is actually soldiered to the motherboard. If you go to the 2 big 3rd party suppliers, Crucial and OWC, you won't even find the air listed. For an external drive to be accessed by both machines it is either going to have to be formatted as Fat32, or you will have to get a NTFS plugin for the air.

Or you could get Networked Attached Storage device and not care what the format is.

If you have a network, that is.

I think the Mac Air RAM issue is that there isn't any more room in it.