New Laptop

[jcooley]

I'm in the the market for a Laptop. What should i be looking for in a laptop that operates fast. I will be running CS5, and Lightroom. Both run slow on my computer I have now.

[autofocus]

Originally Posted by jcooley

I'm in the the market for a Laptop. What should i be looking for in a laptop that operates fast. I will be running CS5, and Lightroom. Both run slow on my computer I have now.

This question has come up many times in the past, and the problem I have with photo editing on a laptop is that the overall brightness, the high contrast, and most significantly the fact that as you move your screen back and forth the image will change as the viewing angle changes. You can use your laptop as the CPU, but I would recommend a separate fixed CRT or flat screen attached to it. I have no experience with MACs, but I assume the issues are the same. In the past, I have done some fun edits on my laptop only to be horrified how those images look on my desktop with a calibrated CRT monitor.

[dlambert]

Here are the main things I'd be looking for:
* You want a Core i5 or i7 processor, if possible.
* Lots of RAM (8 Gig or so, if you can).
* If you can afford an SSD large enough to hold your photos, this will do really good things for speed. Otherwise, Seagate's got a drive called the Momentus that supposed to be sort of a hybrid -- a regular HDD with a few Gig of memory that acts sort of like a small SSD. Check the reviews on these, though, as early examples had reliability problems.