Laptop recommendations for Photoshop?

[Kermit power]

Evening all,

My desktop is pretty much on its last legs... Takes forever to load and process photos, if I'm also using it to play music, the music stutters when it's processing the photos, and it has an alarming habit of randomly turning itself off from time to time. At the moment, it's such a chore to use that it's putting me off taking photos

I'm thinking laptop to replace it, so that I can also plug it into my plasma in the lounge when I want to, but I don't really know what constitutes "decent" in terms of performance for processing photos, so I'm hoping you chaps can advise.

I've got a budget of around £1,000. I've got tablets and my work laptop with which to be mobile, so it doesnt' matter if it's big. The loathing I have for my work iPad (sooo stunted and restrictive when compared to Android) is such that I really don't think I could bring myself to contemplate a Mac, so Windows only, please.

Mods, I deliberately put this in here rather than the computers and gadgets section, as other than web browsing and other things which could be done on the most basic of machines, all my workload is going to be processing photos, so thought I'd get more specifically relevant recommendations in here.

[MitchT]

I know very little about Windows machines but what I can say is that my seven year old MacBook Pro runs Photoshop without breaking a sweat, so I'm sure a new £1k Windows machine would be more than capable. The issue you're likely to have is with the OS. I ran Adobe Creative Suite on a Windows XP machine at work and it was fabulous. We were then made to change to 7 because XP was no longer being supported and it's as flaky as hell. Vista was a disaster and, as I understand it, 8 isn't much better, so choose your OS carefully. The hardware should be more than adequate though.

[Simpo Two]

I'm just glad I do my stuff on XP Pro with an installed version of PS, and don't have to play with 8.1 slidey toy and all this cloud/subscription rubbish. Bah.

If you want to process photos seriously get a desktop.

[LongQ]

You may need to future proof the investment a little given the outlay.

I have a Dell Precision M4700 running Win7 Pro with i7 processor and 512GB SSD as the main drive. It came with 8GB RAM but I added another 16Gb since there were 2 spare slots. I also added a 1TB mSata SSD in another spare slot

It is now 3 year old tech but still performs very well even though I run Capture One rather than any Adobe product. Very stable although there is something about Firefox and Google Analytics that can be annoying now and again and of course Adobe Flash never works without problem messages.

I have some external USB3 drives as well, mainly for backup but they work well enough for editing use provided I don't allow them to go into what seems to be some sort of powersave mode.

The machine was from the Dell Outlet so a lot less than "list" price for the spec. Getting the right spec for the latest versions (M4800/M6800) might stretch your budget a bit, especially with the better screen, but they are solid and fast devices and have good self expansion options.

The only down side to a notebook for photo editing is that there is some software movement towards using OpenCL and GPU cards for faster processing and the cards in notebooks tend not to offer enough performance to make it worthwhile using them instead of the CPU. On the other hand the most powerful cards in desktop require cooling systems and their own powerstation to give best performance (by a few fractions of a second) and one may not feel that is a worthwhile investment on top of the cost of the GPU devices - none of which are cheap if they offer top performance.

Does that help?

[tonyb1968]

I use my MSI gaming laptop for Lightroom 6 and storing my pictures on when I am out and about, was a little bit more than your budget but 1k will get you this which would suffice for your needs

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/100-off-was-1099!-1...

Tony

[covmutley]

£500 laptop and a decent monitor

[LongQ]

tonyb1968 said:

I use my MSI gaming laptop for Lightroom 6 and storing my pictures on when I am out and about, was a little bit more than your budget but 1k will get you this which would suffice for your needs

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/100-off-was-1099!-1...

Tony

The systems Scan sell also look interesting - I keep an eye on the specs for future reference. Like the Pro Dells they offer the advantage, afaik, of upgradability and so should be more future proof as photo editing software moves towards more demanding hardware specs for what we come to expect from the performance angle.

I think they are also built to last through a hard life, as is the Dell.

[Kermit power]

covmutley said:

£500 laptop and a decent monitor

Would it have sufficient grunt, do you think? I've already got a decent external monitor, and I'm happy enough with the photos I get from processing. It's just the vast amount of time I spend looking at the hour glass which makes me feel like throwing it out of the window!!!

[_dobbo_]

Any decent current gen Intel processor will handle PS perfectly well.

If you want it to go quicker, spend less on the laptop and more on a decent sized SSD drive to replace whatever the laptop comes with (unless it already has one).

Nothing will have as much of an impact on performance as a solid state drive vs a spinning disk - also your computer will stay faster for longer.

My 3 year old desktop still boots boots windows 8 within 15 seconds, thanks to the SSD drive. And 5 of that is the POST screen

[George111]

The newer i5 processors are quite quick, add a Samsung SSD drive and 8GB of memory and it should be great for photo editing. I've just given my son a new 'old' laptop, an i3 Dell Latitude from 2011 with one of the first i3 processors, upgraded to 8GB of memory and a Samsung 840 SSD and it's nice and fast, plenty fast enough for photo editing and it drives a 24" monitor well enough too. Most of the time taken to edit photos is in pulling the file off disk and putting it back and the SSD make this almost as fast as anything you can by anywhere.

Everybody's expectations are different but I'd look at £700 all in from the Dell outlet store for an i5 based laptop, 4 or 8 GB of memory (easy to upgrade) and then either get one with an SSD or buy one afterwards.

[andy-xr]

Old installed not cloudy Photoshop wasnt that fussy on processor, it needed RAM more than anything. Not to say that a good processor isnt required, but you could get away with an earlier i5 (equivalent to a modern i3) as long as you had 8+ Gb RAM

I dont know about the newer versions, they might be the same

[Craikeybaby]

Why a laptop if it doesn't have to be mobile and you already have a good monitor? You get much more for your money with a desktop, plus it is easier to add extra memory/storage/up the graphics capability. A new power supply (random switch offs will probably be due to this overheating, maybe even give it a clean with an air duster) and an SSD drive for Windows/Photoshop scratch file will make a big difference.

[Kermit power]

Craikeybaby said:

Why a laptop if it doesn't have to be mobile and you already have a good monitor? You get much more for your money with a desktop, plus it is easier to add extra memory/storage/up the graphics capability. A new power supply (random switch offs will probably be due to this overheating, maybe even give it a clean with an air duster) and an SSD drive for Windows/Photoshop scratch file will make a big difference.

It would be better to say it doesn't have to be easily mobile, I suppose. It will generally live in my study up in the loft conversion, but there are times when I'll want to use it to watch internet only programmes (thinks like the Mountain Bike Enduro World Cup before people get too many smutty ideas!) on my plasma in the comfort of my lounge, plus if I go for something with a 17" screen, I'd probably take that one on holiday for the kids to watch DVDs in the evening. Lastly, on a full summer holiday, I'm likely to want to at least transfer photos off my memory cards even if I don't choose to process them there and then, so wouldn't want to lug a desktop along.

What I'm not going to do is bung it in a backpack and cycle 15 miles to work with it. I've got my small work laptop for that.

[Foliage]

What's your current PCs spec?

[Craikeybaby]

For TV stuff an Apple TV, or chrome cast is a more elegant solution & pretty cheap.

[Kermit power]

Craikeybaby said:

For TV stuff an Apple TV, or chrome cast is a more elegant solution & pretty cheap.

I loathe Apple stuff, due to it being so inflexible and horrible to use (thinking iTunes, iPad and App Store here compared to the Android equivalents), but what does the Chrome Cast offer? I'd still need the laptop - or be prepared to fiddle around entering everything on my phone - wouldn't I?

[Kermit power]

Foliage said:

What's your current PCs spec?

It's an Evesham Solar Quattro 500 SLI. It was pretty decent spec - and almost £1,400!! - when I bought it in 2007, shortly before the bloody company went bust!

The processor is an Intel® Core?2 Extreme Processor QX6700 (Quad Core 2x 4MB cache, 1066MHz), with 8Gb of (fairly slow old DDR2) RAM and a Novatech GeForce GTX260 Sonic SLI 896MB DDR3 graphics card.

Edited by Kermit power on Tuesday 2nd June 16:21

[sgrimshaw]

Have you considered a Surface Pro 3?

I believe there's a Surface Pro 4 around the corner as well

[StuH]

I'd seriously consider upping the budget to the Dell XPS15. For Photoshop you want a fast CPU, fast drive (read SSD), lots of RAM, a GPU that supports CUDA (which massively improves performance) and a good quality display. The XPS15 has the cracking new (sRGB accurate) 4K screen and ticks all the boxes. Guys at work have just been kitted out with them and they (almost) make me want to swap out my Retina Macbook

http://www.dell.com/uk/p/xps-15-9530/pd?oc=cnx9525

[Craikeybaby]

Kermit power said:

Craikeybaby said:

For TV stuff an Apple TV, or chrome cast is a more elegant solution & pretty cheap.

I loathe Apple stuff, due to it being so inflexible and horrible to use (thinking iTunes, iPad and App Store here compared to the Android equivalents), but what does the Chrome Cast offer? I'd still need the laptop - or be prepared to fiddle around entering everything on my phone - wouldn't I?

I've not used a chrome cast, but from what I can tell you select what you want to watch on your phone and send it to the chrome cast. No wires & no need to leave the sofa.