laptop help

Rod Boughton

Rod Boughton

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Rod
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Hi everyone, I do most of my processing work on a laptop, but unfortunately the time has come to buy a new one, I have been looking at various laptops and I am struggling to decide on any particular one, I would like one that is reasonably fast, could anyone advise me on the suitability of either of these :

Lenovo G50 Intel® Core™ i7 Processor, 8Gb RAM, 1Tb Hard Drive, Wi-Fi, 15.6 inch HD Laptop

Toshiba C70D-B-10U AMD A4 Processor, 8Gb RAM, 1Tb Hard Drive, Wi-Fi 17.3 inch Laptop

Lenovo G505s AMD A10 Processor, 8Gb RAM, 1Tb Hard Drive, Wi-Fi, 15.6 inch Laptop

Or any other suggestions, I use PS CS6 and Lightroom

Thanks in advance
Rod
 
Assuming that the three you have chosen have similar specs and cost roughly the same, I would go for the larger screened model.
 
It's not the fastest available, but fast enough. 1.8 GHz
I'm using a 2.5 GHz I3 machine- second hand for about £250- 17 inch screen with extra RAM (8Gb) 500 MB hard disc. 1 Tb discs can be found for about £60.
 
... or you could get a Mac, they are better for visual applications.
 
That's what they were designed for, though I don't like them. I'm happier with a PC.
 
kendo1 said:
If you say so.
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Yup. Just a PC in a fancy box. With a glossy screen (macbooks) which isn't ideal for editing, so with a decent external display its just like every other machine for editing.

Often said we could replace the design suite macs at work with pc and they wouldn't notice a difference. If anything it'd be better for them as it'd have better integration into the windows domain.

The only reason to go for a Mac for editing is personal preference, which if that's your reasoning then fill your boots.

Edit: should obviously add that there are some Mac specific apps like aperture (retirement inbound) or final cut pro, so that could be another reason for only considering Mac.
 
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neil_g said:
Yup. Just a PC in a fancy box. With a glossy screen (macbooks) which isn't ideal for editing, so with a decent external display its just like every other machine for editing.

Often said we could replace the design suite macs at work with pc and they wouldn't notice a difference. If anything it'd be better for them as it'd have better integration into the windows domain.

The only reason to go for a Mac for editing is personal preference, which if that's your reasoning then fill your boots.

Edit: should obviously add that there are some Mac specific apps like aperture (retirement inbound) or final cut pro, so that could be another reason for only considering Mac.
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A lot of people prefer them. I personally do not.
Just thinking about the OP and giving him another option.

A long time friend of mine swears by them. He's a software developer and keen photographer- and hates PCs :) But there again, he only uses the highest spec Macs and displays so you can imagine the cost.
 
Would be ideal if you could slip an IPS screen in there.

I was not impressed by the current lenovo 15" machines. In fact I would only look at their business class machines because, as neil says, the lower spec ones are not very good.
 
I've just got a Lenovo Z50 laptop! Runs cs6 flawlessly processing and locating! Dual core i7 processor 8gb ram 1tb hdd 2gb dedicated graphics card and 15.6 LED fhd screen

Great piece of kit for a laptop! Worth a looky.......
 
Got a trusty Lenovo T400 here, still ticking along smoothly and built to last!! Can't speak for the G series, but based on my experience of the T series and a colleagues Yoga2 I'm impressed!!

And with regards to the macbook.... If you know and like OSX and want the integration with other apple products then its not a bad option. However, they bring nothing additional featurewise than a PC and can accomplish nothing more either. Nice unibody design (although let's not get me started on lack of ports) and the retina screen is nice when the application supports it (hideous when it doesn't!)...
 
Thanks everyone for your advice and input, still got a lot to think about.
 
Honestly unless I never used content aware in PS CS6 or adjustment brushes in LR 5.x I wouldn't be happy editing on any machine, Mac or PC, that couldn't clock over 3.5GHz. Just too laggy otherwise. 8GB Ram is fine, 4 is too little, 16 only gives a tiny improvement and there is no real advantage going from 16 to 32 for 99+% of users. Also, an SSD for your boot drive really improves performance.

How much machine you need really depends on your expectations. For example:
  • My core i5 Surface Pro2 (1.9 GHz base and 2.9 GHz turbo) with 8GB RAM or our loaded up Macbook Air are a bit underpowered to get great performance from LR5 or CS6, but are certainly ok for light editing. Brushes and content aware healing are noticeably laggy though ... but if you don't need them much you'll probably be happy with those kinds of spec'd machines.

  • To get near perfect/zero lag performance from LR 5.x and PS CS6 I upgraded from a very decent, slightly overclocked i7 930 desktop machine with SSD boot drive and 12GB RAM (more powerful than the two laptops mentioned above), which still had laggy brushes and very slow content aware healing in PS (just not nearly as bad), to a slightly overclocked i7 4770K desktop machine (4.2GHz) with SSD for boot drive and 16GB RAM (I later upgraded to 32, with zero additional performance boost).
It's unfortunate, but LR5.x and PS CS6 are total resource hogs compared to LR4.x and CS5. At least LR 5.7 seems to be better than 5.0. :)

So ... you can go from an elegant little laptop that's easy to carry around, with a lighter weight CPU that gives great battery life, but would be pretty frustrating lag wise for anyone that uses some of the resource hungry tools, to either a very expensive lappy like the highest spec'd Macbook Pro or Lenovo (really expensive) or a monster tower (also can be expensive) that can crunch through any task at blazing speed.

Once you get your new system setup follow Adobe's advice to optimize performance: http://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom/kb/optimize-performance-lightroom.html . If you get an SSD for your boot drive move your LR backups, catalog files and previews to it, which also speeds things up a bit. You just have to delete some of the backups every once in a while to prevent filling the drive.

I really apologise if the above creates more confusion and I'm not suggesting that you throw a bunch of money around and buy some monster system. It's just good to know that the lower spec'd machines are a compromise, but if it's in areas you could care less about then it certainly could be the best choice for lots of reasons (budget, portability, battery life, etc.).
 
I never got all of the complaints about LR5 being a hog.

It never uses more than 2.5gb ram and even with a second gen i7 it flys. Ssd for the cat and working set of images is a good move though.
 
neil_g said:
I never got all of the complaints about LR5 being a hog.

It never uses more than 2.5gb ram and even with a second gen i7 it flys. Ssd for the cat and working set of images is a good move though.
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It is a hog, and CS6 is even worse, but goes unnoticed depending on what you are doing. Very large meta data updates can really bog things down, as well as publishing many galleries at the same time to sharing sites like Smugmug. If you use a Wacom tablet and expect the on screen action to exactly keep up with your brush stroke then forget about the lower powered machines.

RAM isn't the biggest help for these two programs. As long as you have at least 8 you're fine, even for using PS and LR simultaneously. I've consumed over 4GB RAM when working with LR alone, so I know it's too little. However, processor speed and an SSD give the biggest bang for the buck.
 
Sorry but disagree.

Cs6 I can't vouch for personally as I run cs4 but we run a few copies of the newer version (before we switched to cc but that's mostly still 6 I think) on 2008 and upward MacBook pros at work and receive no complains regarding speed.

Lr5 though is a breeze with a reasonable spec machine. I don't do publishing to external sources from the program so can't comment on that directly but exporting multiple batches is pretty fast on the old 2600k. Sure it uses a fair chunk of CPU time but of course it's going to.

Like I say LR does not depend largely on ram (never ever seen it rise beyond 2.5gb whatever I've been doing and that's across versions 3 to 5), as it prefers CPU and disk performance but ps definitely needs CPU and ram (SSD will help if you have less ram and are scratching to disk) and it has a direct impact on performance. For example moving from cs3 (32bit) to cs4 (64bit) had a huge decrease in processing times because of the increase in memory available.
 
neil_g said:
Sorry but disagree.

Cs6 I can't vouch for personally as I run cs4 but we run a few copies of the newer version (before we switched to cc but that's mostly still 6 I think) on 2008 and upward MacBook pros at work and receive no complains regarding speed.

Lr5 though is a breeze with a reasonable spec machine. I don't do publishing to external sources from the program so can't comment on that directly but exporting multiple batches is pretty fast on the old 2600k. Sure it uses a fair chunk of CPU time but of course it's going to.

Like I say LR does not depend largely on ram (never ever seen it rise beyond 2.5gb whatever I've been doing and that's across versions 3 to 5), as it prefers CPU and disk performance but ps definitely needs CPU and ram (SSD will help if you have less ram and are scratching to disk) and it has a direct impact on performance. For example moving from cs3 (32bit) to cs4 (64bit) had a huge decrease in processing times because of the increase in memory available.
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You aren't saying anything different than I've what I've said already. LR doesn't need much RAM, but it does need at least 8GB to handle all situations. I've managed to get RAM useage to be >7GB when using LR and doing massive meta data updates and publishing many galleries to Smugmug at the same time. Since no one would buy a computer with less than 8GB anymore, RAM isn't an issue.

There is a huge difference in resource requirements between CS5 (which isn't much different than CS4) and CS6. What Adobe has managed to do is really horrible. I can easily run CS4 on my 5 year old Windows laptop, but no way will the same laptop work for CS6. LR5 is only horrible with the lower spec'd machines when publishing a lot of galleries at the same time, doing very large meta-data updates and when using certain brushes like the Spot Removal Tool. Most of this can only be solved with more CPU power. Everyones tolerance to what's acceptable is different though.
 
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