Help buying a new laptop

[Skyline]

With so many out there and with me not being the best at knowing the difference 8 ram or 50 ram does I thought I better ask for help.

What would you recommend (laptop) for doing my photography work on.
Lots of space needed for the photos (I do keep an external hard drive and disc them too)
An excellent screen to view them on. I use LR3 and CS5.

Apart from photography, it would also be used for watching film and plenty of surfing the net, with 10 of more pages open at any one time

I can spend around £800.

Thanks for any help.

Dave

 

[arad85]

Dell XPS with full HD screen. Not sure how much they are, but I'm very happy with ours.

 

[stormienam]

Go for a second hand MacBook got a black MacBook in 2009 4gb ram 500gb hard drive for like £600, you can get them a lot cheaper now, love it and run cs5 and Lightroom 3 always on Internet at se time too no problems, for £800 you could more than likely get a second hand MacBook pro

 

[sunnyside_up]

With so many out there and with me not being the best at knowing the difference 8 ram or 50 ram does I thought I better ask for help.

What would you recommend (laptop) for doing my photography work on.
Lots of space needed for the photos (I do keep an external hard drive and disc them too)
An excellent screen to view them on. I use LR3 and CS5.

Apart from photography, it would also be used for watching film and plenty of surfing the net, with 10 of more pages open at any one time

I can spend around £800.

Thanks for any help.

Dave

Hi Dave. I went down the laptop route initially, then settled on pc in the end as was struggling to get what I wanted in the price range I had. You've got a better ceiling than I had.

RAM-the more the better... 4gb is the minimum acceptable really to maximise the efficiency of your higher end photo editing software. 6 is better, 8 or more would be awesome! Try to find out when you're looking around if the current memory is expandable. Always handy.

Hard drive... Again, the bigger the better for file storage, but I found it useful to have an external hard drive for backups and archived files. So you could scrimp a bit there as you mentioned that you already have this.

The biggy, and this is what normally jacks up the price of your laptop, is a dedicated graphics card. An integrated one will not perform as well and some program's such as OnOne require a dedicated one, or at least 256k allocated separately. A 1gb g force graphics card is pretty sweet.

The other important biggy is the processor.... 3ghz-4 minimum, the faster the better.

If you search for gaming laptops, they'll usually have similar specs to this. Dell do a great range and you can build your own spec I believe.

Of course, you can run photoshop and Lightroom on less spec than this, but if you want the performance, following this sort of spec is a good direction to take. It's easier and cheaper to find this on a pc, so I missed out on a laptop, after much looking.

Hope you can get something out of that info...this is what I learned from my search.

Beth

 

[arad85]

The biggy, and this is what normally jacks up the price of your laptop, is a dedicated graphics card. An integrated one will not perform as well

I'd be quite happy with an integrated graphics card on a second/third gen i5/i7 processor.

 

[Skyline]

With so many out there and with me not being the best at knowing the difference 8 ram or 50 ram does I thought I better ask for help.

What would you recommend (laptop) for doing my photography work on.
Lots of space needed for the photos (I do keep an external hard drive and disc them too)
An excellent screen to view them on. I use LR3 and CS5.

Apart from photography, it would also be used for watching film and plenty of surfing the net, with 10 of more pages open at any one time

I can spend around £800.

Thanks for any help.

Dave

Dell XPS with full HD screen. Not sure how much they are, but I'm very happy with ours.

Go for a second hand MacBook got a black MacBook in 2009 4gb ram 500gb hard drive for like £600, you can get them a lot cheaper now, love it and run cs5 and Lightroom 3 always on Internet at se time too no problems, for £800 you could more than likely get a second hand MacBook pro

Hi Dave. I went down the laptop route initially, then settled on pc in the end as was struggling to get what I wanted in the price range I had. You've got a better ceiling than I had.

RAM-the more the better... 4gb is the minimum acceptable really to maximise the efficiency of your higher end photo editing software. 6 is better, 8 or more would be awesome! Try to find out when you're looking around if the current memory is expandable. Always handy.

Hard drive... Again, the bigger the better for file storage, but I found it useful to have an external hard drive for backups and archived files. So you could scrimp a bit there as you mentioned that you already have this.

The biggy, and this is what normally jacks up the price of your laptop, is a dedicated graphics card. An integrated one will not perform as well and some program's such as OnOne require a dedicated one, or at least 256k allocated separately. A 1gb g force graphics card is pretty sweet.

The other important biggy is the processor.... 3ghz-4 minimum, the faster the better.

If you search for gaming laptops, they'll usually have similar specs to this. Dell do a great range and you can build your own spec I believe.

Of course, you can run photoshop and Lightroom on less spec than this, but if you want the performance, following this sort of spec is a good direction to take. It's easier and cheaper to find this on a pc, so I missed out on a laptop, after much looking.

Hope you can get something out of that info...this is what I learned from my search.

Beth

I'd be quite happy with an integrated graphics card on a second/third gen i5/i7 processor.

Thank you all for taking the time to help

 

[stupidlammer]

See if you find a used Vaio Z (2010 model onwards) with the 1920x1080 screens. Great for photo work.