Upgrading laptop components for faster editing

Steven001

Steven001

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Steven
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Hi folks,

I recently upgraded my laptop RAM from 4BG to its maximum of 8GB (crucial ram). After that Lightroom 5 worked very well editing my 12MP images from my Nikon D90, however I've just purchased a D7100 it's starting to struggle a little bit. I am still able to edit images, but just not as fast or as smooth as I would like. I have had the laptop for years now and this the spec:

Acer Aspite 5755G
450GB Hard Drive (always struggling with space)
Windows 7 Home Premium 64
Intel Core i5-2450M 2.5GHz
8GB RAM

The only thing I can think about upgrading is the hard drive. Would upgrading to a solid state hard drive make it noticeable quicker?
 
Fitting a SSD would make it much faster but not necessarily for processing, my guess is the limiting factor being the 8GB RAM ... you could also check that you have the latest driver for your video 'card' :)
 
gramps said:
Fitting a SSD would make it much faster but not necessarily for processing, my guess is the limiting factor being the 8GB RAM ... you could also check that you have the latest driver for your video 'card' :)
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+1
 
8GB is the maximum that my motherboard will allow for some reason (according to the crucial website) which is rather annoying! I'll have a look and see if there are any new drivers for my video card. The video card is a Nvidia GeForce GT630M
 
Editing in what?

Light room likes CPU and fast disk, Photoshop likes CPU and ram.

GPU acceleration is still pretty limited. But with a laptop you won't be able to change much other than the ram and hard drive anyway.
 
neil_g said:
Editing in what?

Light room likes CPU and fast disk, Photoshop likes CPU and ram.

GPU acceleration is still pretty limited. But with a laptop you won't be able to change much other than the ram and hard drive anyway.
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I do 90% of my editing in Lightroom and only really use photoshop for merging panoramas which can be very memory intensive. I haven't tried that yet with the 24MP files, but I suspect it will perform similar to the 12MP files did before I upgraded the RAM.

It's certainly usable just now, it just take a few seconds to load the images at full resolution and switch between images. As I'm already at my max RAM capacity and can't upgrade the processor, I guess I'll need to start saving for a new laptop?
 
You'll certainly need a faster processor as ram and hdd upgrades won't do it on their own. Does it have to be a laptop? You can get a proper editing desktop that will actually shame any laptop for a good chunk less money.
 
Brazo said:
You'll certainly need a faster processor as ram and hdd upgrades won't do it on their own. Does it have to be a laptop? You can get a proper editing desktop that will actually shame any laptop for a good chunk less money.
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I do love the portability of a laptop, but if I'm telling the truth 95% of the time I use it I'm in the house. What sort of desktop would you recommend, just so I have an idea of how much it would cost?
 
I find it very hard to believe that memory is limiting you now. However that is easily checked by reviewing how much you are paging to disk.

Anyway a SSD will make a significant and very noticeable difference. That together with the memory upgrade you've already done should make for a very useable system.

My Microsoft surface pro is a i5 with 8gb and 256 SSD. Has no issues whatsoever running Lightroom.
 
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To be honest I would go with your first plan of upgrade to a decent SSD and see what you get from that.
Worst case scenario is you are £50 down and a bit of time. A decent desktop will bring your times down but not that much, a few seconds switching images is pretty ok I think. You will have to spend a lot to really bring those times down.
 
Mr Bump said:
To be honest I would go with your first plan of upgrade to a decent SSD and see what you get from that.
Worst case scenario is you are £50 down and a bit of time. A decent desktop will bring your times down but not that much, a few seconds switching images is pretty ok I think. You will have to spend a lot to really bring those times down.
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My SO uses LR on a similar spec laptop with a fast SSD and she's more than happy with it. It's an i3 rather than an i5 too.
 
There are a lot of people on here with silly money setups chasing 10ths of a second and the restricting factor is the software is pretty lame to be honest, its not properly optimized for multi threaded CPUs. Add an SSD and clone your disk to it and you should be good to go.
 
afasoas said:
My SO uses LR on a similar spec laptop with a fast SSD and she's more than happy with it. It's an i3 rather than an i5 too.
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im sure she is, happy with processing speed is very subjective though if you have to go make a cuppa between batches ;)

Mr Bump said:
There are a lot of people on here with silly money setups chasing 10ths of a second and the restricting factor is the software is pretty lame to be honest, its not properly optimized for multi threaded CPUs. Add an SSD and clone your disk to it and you should be good to go.
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whos that then?

when i moved from my Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 to my i7-2600k back in the day (still running it now, thats how good the i7 are) it took minutes off of batch processing times in LR.

obviously a processor upgrade is out of the question for the OP but to suggest just because X person is happy with a low end dual core its far too subjective to say everyone will be.

oh and on the topic of multi thread optimized software, again back in the day, moving from CS3 to CS4 on the i7 system took the old stress test action from 3 mins 30 secs down to 23 secs. so i think adobe have that one nailed now. or at least its much better.
 
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You should be able to pick up a desktop for £500 that will outrun any laptop.

When you say it takes a few seconds to switch between images, how long does it really take? My old 2012 Mac book pro with the i5 used to take a good 8 seconds to open a 24 meg file from scratch at 1:1 and I suspect that Mac book i5 is a lot quicker than your CPU.
 
One thing to suggest for the op for his current system (might've been suggested already) is to open task manger while editing. Depending on your os it should give you an idea of whether your system is struggling for CPU, ram or disk (disk is only in w8 and above iirc).
 
neil_g said:
when i moved from my Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 to my i7-2600k back in the day (still running it now, thats how good the i7 are) it took minutes off of batch processing times in LR.
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My desktop uses the same processor, built it new year's day 2011 as the old computer went pop the day before and Novatech still had shops you could buy components over the counter. Still going strong and taking everything I throw at it, haven't ever needed to look at overclocking it either..
 
Brazo said:
You should be able to pick up a desktop for £500 that will outrun any laptop.
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Yes.. but if you'd care to pick-up that desktop whilst I pick-up my laptop, we'll see who outruns who!


(there are plenty of good reasons for choosing a laptop over a desktop and vice versa!)
 
neil_g said:
One thing to suggest for the op for his current system (might've been suggested already) is to open task manger while editing. Depending on your os it should give you an idea of whether your system is struggling for CPU, ram or disk (disk is only in w8 and above iirc).
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Or you could use the proper tool for the job which is perfmon which has been with pretty much every ms os from the year dot.
 
Thanks for the all the advice guys. I think I'll likely get a SSD and see how that works out first. A 500gb SSD is quite expensive "test" to see if it works better. Would it be better to remove all non essentials (photos mainly) onto an external drive and buy a smaller capacity SSD for the OS and software programs? It is handy to be able to use my laptop without any portable drives attached, but it's obviously most cost effective way to do it. Ideally I would get a 1TB SSD and do away with an external drive except for backups.
 
Mr Bump said:
Or you could use the proper tool for the job which is perfmon which has been with pretty much every ms os from the year dot.
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yeah you could, if the OP knows how to work perfmon (no offence to the OP). everyone knows how to work task manager.

Steven001 said:
Thanks for the all the advice guys. I think I'll likely get a SSD and see how that works out first. A 500gb SSD is quite expensive "test" to see if it works better. Would it be better to remove all non essentials (photos mainly) onto an external drive and buy a smaller capacity SSD for the OS and software programs? It is handy to be able to use my laptop without any portable drives attached, but it's obviously most cost effective way to do it. Ideally I would get a 1TB SSD and do away with an external drive except for backups.
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as above, what resource is your computer struggling with presently?
 
CPU spikes are okay - it's normal for CPU usage to be quite "bursty".
It's constant high CPU use that's the problem.
 
Steven001 said:
Thanks for the all the advice guys. I think I'll likely get a SSD and see how that works out first. A 500gb SSD is quite expensive "test" to see if it works better. Would it be better to remove all non essentials (photos mainly) onto an external drive and buy a smaller capacity SSD for the OS and software programs? It is handy to be able to use my laptop without any portable drives attached, but it's obviously most cost effective way to do it. Ideally I would get a 1TB SSD and do away with an external drive except for backups.
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While it is a bit of an expensive experiment you could try it and if it is not suitable and you decide to upgrade to a new machine (PC or Laptop) you could transfer it over. Just keep your existing drive and the laptop can be back up and running :)

Personally I use a PC for all my editing as you generally get a better machine for your money (my day job is computer repairs), they are easier and you have more scope to upgrade. I also rarely do any editing out and about. I only ever take my laptop with me if I want to backup on the move.
 
sjc1919 said:
While it is a bit of an expensive experiment you could try it and if it is not suitable and you decide to upgrade to a new machine (PC or Laptop) you could transfer it over. Just keep your existing drive and the laptop can be back up and running :)

Personally I use a PC for all my editing as you generally get a better machine for your money (my day job is computer repairs), they are easier and you have more scope to upgrade. I also rarely do any editing out and about. I only ever take my laptop with me if I want to backup on the move.
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get a 256Gb - 58 Quid delivered

http://www.ebuyer.com/727919-crucial-bx200-240gb-2-5-inch-ssd-ct240bx200ssd1
 
Interesting (if old now) article here about performance testing with an SSD : http://www.computer-darkroom.com/blog/will-an-ssd-improve-adobe-lightroom-performance/

So, having established that the use of an SSD offers only marginal improvements to Library preview rendering and photo load times in Develop module where can we realistically see an SSD helping a Lightroom user? Well, Lightroom isn’t just about rendering Library previews or loading photos into the the Develop module editing window. At Lightroom’s heart is a SQLite database, and the very fast access times associated with SSDs means that reading metadata from the catalog, searching the catalog, etc will be noticeably faster than on a conventional disk drive. Likewise, Library module thumbnail and preview scrolling (sometimes referred to as louping) will be noticeably faster and smoother. Other areas where the the use of an SSD will help include application launch times and computer boot time. Overall, installing Lightroom (includes catalog, previews and Camera Raw cache) on an SSD will result in the application feeling more responsive than is the case with a conventional disk drive. However, as the various tests have demonstrated, SSDs are not the magic bullet that some would have you believe.
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I upgraded my PC with better GPU, CPU & Memory & kept my old disks, and the responsiveness was far superior, Neil's comment about opening Task Manager to get an idea where your bottlenecks are is the best advice. Every system is different, and every user has different perceptions of 'slow'.
 
sjc1919 said:
While it is a bit of an expensive experiment you could try it and if it is not suitable and you decide to upgrade to a new machine (PC or Laptop) you could transfer it over. Just keep your existing drive and the laptop can be back up and running :)

Personally I use a PC for all my editing as you generally get a better machine for your money (my day job is computer repairs), they are easier and you have more scope to upgrade. I also rarely do any editing out and about. I only ever take my laptop with me if I want to backup on the move.
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That's a good point, as you say a PC is probably better (the biggee screen being a big plus for editing), but i do like the portability of the laptop (as a luxury, i dont particular neee it to be portable)

Mr Bump said:
get a 256Gb - 58 Quid delivered

http://www.ebuyer.com/727919-crucial-bx200-240gb-2-5-inch-ssd-ct240bx200ssd1
Click to expand...

That would be ideal but my 450GB hard drive is almost full just now, I'd need to remove all of my photographs onto a portable hard drive and use constantly have it attached to the laptop.


Harlequin565 said:
Interesting (if old now) article here about performance testing with an SSD : http://www.computer-darkroom.com/blog/will-an-ssd-improve-adobe-lightroom-performance/



I upgraded my PC with better GPU, CPU & Memory & kept my old disks, and the responsiveness was far superior, Neil's comment about opening Task Manager to get an idea where your bottlenecks are is the best advice. Every system is different, and every user has different perceptions of 'slow'.
Click to expand...

That's a good article, thanks for sharing. I used the task manager before upgrading the RAM it was regularly running at 80-100%, with 8gb it runs a lot lower the majority of the time, it's just a shame that's the maximum the motherboard supports. My CPU usage can be quite high, but doesn't seem to struggle too much when I only have Lightroom open, but it still feels down in performance.
 
SSDs should go straight into a laptop without needing adapters - they already match the current standard size for a laptop drive.

If you can wait & monitor prices, sometimes Amazon and ebuyer do some really good deals on 1TB SSDs - I picked up a 960GB Sandisk Ultra II for £139.99 last week from Amazon. That would allow you to keep your photos on the computer instead of having to put them on a (slow) external drive.
 
Thanks for that, I'll keep an eye on amazon daily deals :)

I brought up the task manager whilst merging 10 24MP raw files into a panorama. The CPU usage stayed quite low, but it was using 7.2GB of RAM and obviously took some time. Ideally I would love to put another 4GB of RAM in it along with a SSD, but my motherboard is capped at 8GB :(
 
Personally I'd always go for a Samsung evo or pro.

As said you should not need any adapters just watch the thickness of the drive, there are 2 types and I can't remember if the screw hole patterns are different. I suspect not but worth checking.
 
neil_g said:
Personally I'd always go for a Samsung evo or pro.

As said you should not need any adapters just watch the thickness of the drive, there are 2 types and I can't remember if the screw hole patterns are different. I suspect not but worth checking.
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Thanks Neil, the Samsung Evo's do seem to get really good reviews but are more expensive than other brands. Ebuyer has a 1TB SanDisk Ultra 11 on sale for £149.99 for today only. I don't know if 1TB is a bit overkill though, especially considering I'll probably need to upgrade the laptop in a year or two.
 
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