Hello All,

I am in the market for a new notebook. For the past four years, I’ve been faithfully using an Apple Powerbook G3 (Pismo) to do a lot of my graphic design and creative work. I’ve upgraded the memory to about 640MB, and replaced the 450Mhz G3 with an official 550Mhz G4.

I’ve been looking at the Sony TR as a replacement to my Mac. I like its form factor, style, well…just about everything.

However I have come across a few posts, and snippets, here and there, that make it sound like the Sony TR isn’t powerful enough to handle working inside some more demanding applications.

Some of the apps I use on a daily basis:

Photoshop, Illustrator, and Acrobat CS
Dreamweaver MX and Flash MX Pro
Quark XPress 6.1
and of course MS Office

Now I have no problem rebuying most of my software for PC, but I’d like to hear some opinions about the TR in working with applications (more than just surf and email usage).

I should note that I’m looking at buying the TR5AP.

Thanks!

I personally used my TR with the following apps and it seems to map up close to what you need to use:

Photoshop CS
Illustrator CS
Acrobat 6
Premiere Pro 1.5
Flash MX 2004
Homesite 5.5 (I don’t use Dreamwever normally)
Office 2003

I have been able to do full projects with it and it’s worked like a charm. On some larger projects there’s a little bit of slowing down but I was able to complete most projects on the TR which I found pretty amazing. It was mostly with really large image files in Photoshop or very very large DV files in Premiere.

So, it is possible and it is very functional. You may find yourself occasionally using the Adobe Zoom buttons to go in/out of your images but overall it’s surprisingly usable. You may want to purchase a Wacom Tablet or a good mouse if you plan on doing lots of graphics work though.

I noticed in the “post your workspace pics” topic, you run your Sony TR out to an external widescreen SGI flat panel.

Have you ever noticed any slowness from the system caused by the onboard intel graphic chipset? I would be using my TR mostly at work, where the VGA would be passed out to a 19” or 21” CRT (probably running 1280x1024 or higher).

I tested one of the low-end Sony TR’s at a local store, I know it can support 1280x1024 @ 85hz at least.

Actually that LCD monitor in the background is connected to my desktop computer. I have connected the TR to another LCD monitor though and several CRTs and it works fine. I don’t think you want to push any higher than 1280x1024. I noticed that the 1024x768 mode is much sharper probably because the DAC doesn’t have as much bandwidth when you’re trying to push a higher resolution.