VMWare - Delivering on what it promises and more

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I've just starting using VMware Workstation 5.0.

More to come on this later, but the short review is this:

You can try it out for free (http://www.vmware.com/download/) . Do it! It's far easier than you might expect, and it works far better than you might expect too.

So far I have installed Fedora Core 2 and found it easier to install in the Virtual machine than it was to install on my real desktop.

This is not a simulator, but instead creates virtual machines. In some cases, a vitural machine cna actually run faster that a real machine becasue it doesn't have "real" hardware to wait on for certain operations.

vMware offers high-end solution that go beyond the workstation offering by allowing remote users of mulitple virtual machines on varying hardware and operating systems. On the really high end is support for virtual computer farms that can be move from real-machine to real-machine in real-time. Go figure...

This is an excellent piece of software for putting together demos. Becasue the harddrives and memory are virtual, vMware can support full-rollbacks to to check points. You can even roll-back to check point and keep the states that exist after that point. In other words, you can have forks in the machines state. If you understand that wihout using vMware, consider yourself pretty smart.

Nikon Coolscan 5000 Photo Scanner

The plan was to scan all of those old negatives into the computer to preserve them for the future... the reality is something quite different but still pretty good.

The problems are:

1. time
2. disk space
3. an eye for getting all those settings right

The Nikon Coolscan 5000 ED offers the about the best speed I could find in a consumer class scanner.

Having said this, it might be pretty much irrelevant. No matter how fast the scanner is, you still have to wait long enough for a strip of 35 mm film to be scanned that becomes a batch process that's lasts long enough to keep you from wanting to sit through it all.

That is.... if you don't care to make custom settings on each negative you scan. Sadly, you probably will...

Even more sad for me... is the fact that making those setting seems to be a bit of an art I'm not all that great at. I can do it, but not quickly.


Don't get me wrong! The Nikon software is the best out there at this level. It will let you do just about anything. That's the problem.

With so many options, you can't simply press a button a scan your strip of negatives.

It turns out that you probably need all those options to get a decent scan. Each negative has it's own issues.

Does it sound like I'm complaining? Please understand that what I'm really saying is that I had un-reasonable expectations for my scanner that weren't met.

I figured technology would be at the point by now that I could set it up, callibrate it and start feeding it negatives. It isn't. It's good, but it's not there yet.

I had hoped it would be akin to converting all my old music CDs to MP3 files and then putting the CDs away in a closet.

This is the process I went through when I got settled in with my iPod:
1. Start iTunes
2. Configure appropriately
3. Insert CD
4. Wait for it to be convert to MP3 files
5. goto set 3 [until out of CDs]


So, when it came to film scanning, I expected a process of feeding the negatives one strip at a time in a mindless fashion until they were all scanned in.

The process requires and rightfully deserves far more attention than this though.


My other failure here was in the idea of scanning them all for future preservation.

It turns out that any format I would want to save them in for the future is quite big.

So, I need to make sure I only scan the "really good ones" for posterity.

Another alternative would be to batch scan the negative into a lower quality format for reference back to the original negatives. At least this way I could quickly review my collection on the computer screen and locate the picture I want. Hopefully one day I will be that organized. (Maybe when the kids are gone.)


Having said all that, I have to say the Nikon CoolScan is amazing for scanning in one of those old photos and bringing new life to a negative I had filed away and really didn't have any useful access to.

It's just, .... well,... it's great for one or two pictures at a time, not scanning them all in for future reference. And, that's what I had wanted to do.

Digital ICE is everthing people say it is. Don't buy a scanner without it. That means buy Nikon.

Hopefully I'll have more to say on this topic based upon my re-set expectations. For now, back to my wonderful scanner...