M1 compare the limitations of at least two different hardware devices and two different software packages utilised for the capture, manipulation...

Paint & Photoshop.

Photoshop is a very in depth and complex graphics application with many of tools and advanced manipulation techniques at hand. The adobe suite is the industry standard for graphic manipulation and production which tells you already how advanced and professional this programme is. There are many tools that can be used in photoshop such as the alteration of hue, contrast, saturation, brightening, and lightening. There are also other very useful tools to name a few; the magic wand and the lasso tool. All of the techniques listed are professional and modern ways of graphic manipulation and production. Compared to paint it is easy to see that photoshop is utilised for advanced graphic manipulation. There are very basic features in paint such as the ability to crop and resize an image and to add text and auto shapes but other than this all other tools required to produce an advanced graphic are absent. Paint lacks tools such as layering and magnetic cropping, which amongst many are huge negative factors against this programme which is why Photoshop would be the definite application to use when in need of a professional grpahic manipulation, despite of its high price.

RAM - 512mb DDR (333mhz) vs 1gb DDR2 (667mhz)

immediately you can see there is a difference in the two stated peices of hardware. Firstly one is DDR and the other is DDR2 which basically means one is single channel memory and the other is dual channel memory, this results in faster process times and allows the system to have more applications running simutaneously. 512mb is clearly less memory that 1gb which will also affect performance as it cannot run as many applications or perhaps a single large application as efficient and fast as 1gb stick of RAM could. And lastly the speed of the RAM is different and almost double! this will obviously result in faster loading speeds and better fluency when running large programmes, perhaps a game for example. 512mb of RAM is just not enough to run a graphics programme as smooth as it would need to be, it would cause endless problems such as crashing and would often be very "laggy".

Processor - 3.2ghz pentium 4 HT (1mb L2 cache) vs Intel core 2 duo E8400 3.0ghz (6mb cache)

the limitations of the 3.2ghz p4 compared to the core 2 duo would be as follows;

1) the clock speed of the single core processor would not be able to process data as quick as the core to duo would maninly due to the fact the core 2 duo has 2 subcores allowing it to break down the data faster and more efficiently.

2) The cache comparison between the two processors would also be a large factor in limiation terms because it cannot communicate to other components as quickly therefore this could result in slower loads times, slow on screen performance and even crashing.

The 3.2ghz processor would be able to handle a graphics manipulation programme if used alongside a strong rig but would still not function as fluently or as reliable as a core 2 duo processor would.