Another what laptop question!

ian-83

ian-83

Suspended / Banned
Messages
1,541
Name
Ian
Edit My Images
Yes
Sorry for dragging up the same old question once again.

But trying to decide on a laptop to replace my aging PC and to free up some space around the house too by losing the PC and desk.

Looked at machines and spoke to my friend who works in IT (app developer among other things) he has suggested I get an Intel i5 machine with as much RAM as i can get. Had a look at a few machines with 4gb and add another 4gb once it arrives to get it upto 8gb which should be plenty enough.

But I won't be using the laptop all the time for photo editing mostly approx 30-40% of it's use will be this and the rest will be usual e-mails and web surfing so would a 3rd gen Intel i3 chip be ok as I am not over fussed by it being a little slower?

Will be getting Windows 8 so looks like I will need a new copy of Elements as it looks like version 10 won't work!
 
i3/i5 in laptops - probably not a lot in it really. The i5 has turbo boost and a slightly higher starting clock speed, but all else is pretty equal (assuming you are talking about the 3110M/3120M i3's) as they are all dual core processors (it's only the i7-xxxxQMs that are quad core mobile).

Depends on the saving TBH. If it's around 10% of the price, all else being equal, I'd probably go i5.
 
Had a look about and an Acer Aspire E1 is £330 with an i3-3110M and 4gb ram and 500gb hard drive or if i spend about £400 I can get a Toshiba Satellite C850 same size ram and hard drive but an i5-3210M. Or another option is Dell do a machine which is 6gb and 1TB hard drive with an i5310M for about £460

If i want to upgrade more RAM will this affect the warranty in any way? Or is it worth keeping the old stuff and switch it about if i get problems?

also how big a hard drive is worth having would 1TB be over kill? And for occasional photoshop work is 4gb enough?
 
Photoshop uses memory depending on what you do with it. If you do a couple of minor edits and save, then close the image, memory usage will be totally different compared to 100 open files and 30 layers on each. Or do you mean Elements (which I have no real experience of).

i3-3110 vs i5-3210... In hindsight, I'd probably go i5, all else being equal. But it does depend if the extra 25% is a big deal for you and what your typical PS usage is.
 
I only have Photoshop elements but will have to upgrade it as its not windows 8 compatible.

I only tend to have one image open at a time and maybe upto 5 layers so not going to be high usage. Am I correct in thinking ram needed would be based on image size times by how many image and layers I have open?
So a 500mb image with 4 layers would need 2gb of ram space?
 
RAM: yup.. not quite as simple, but you've got the idea...

Have a look what it takes on yours or your mates PC...
 
Well just had a look on my current PC with this one page open and anti virus doing a scan and it's using 82% of the 2gb that's installed :thinking: least I know why it slows up so much when I open photoshop elements.

How much will the processor affect speed of doing tasks compare to making sure I have lots of ram to carry out the tasks?

Only asking as the other half recently purchased a new laptop from Tesco and while waiting for her to pay I had a look what they had on display and they had one machine with 6gb of ram and a 500gb hard drive but an AMD Dual core E-300 processor. From what I can find the i3-3110m is almost twice as fast but will i notice the difference when it comes to using photoshop elements? I am guessing day to day stuff it won't be as noticeable? And would 4gb of ram suffice or should i use the machine first and up it to 6 or 8gb if it seems slow when editing photo;s?
 
I am on Windows 8 (same as 7 really) and I have 9 tabs open in Chrome, Outlook, 2 explorer windows open, 2 SQL databases running in the background and a few Metro apps open and I am using 3.9Gb of RAM out of 8Gb.

4Gb is the minimum you want and ideally you want more.
 
Personally, I wouldn't buy an AMD. Upgrading laptop memory is easy and cheap(ish) upgrading processors is impossible.
 
Aye. Drop an extra amount of RAM in if you feel it is running out now you know how to find out ;) and possibly upgrade to an SSD in the future (assuming yoiu can get one big enough at a price you can afford - they're coming down almost daily) and you'll be sorted
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top