Laptop for photo editing

Hi everyone,

I realise this has been covered before however times move so quickly so was hoping you would help me out.

My current laptop has broken, has a graphics issue, luckily the shop has recognised the fault and evn though out of warranty will give me some money back. This leaves me in the position of laptop shopping!

I used to have a fair idea about computers, but a couple of years of not having to sell/buy one means i'm not quite upto spec anymore! I'm looking for a laptop to use CS4 on, however i'm impatient so end up having several things running at once, so looking at 4gb RAM, i'd like a decent sized hard drive but have an external and can buy another. Its the processors and screen that are causing some confusion. This will be my only machine (not ideal I know but a comprimise I'm happy with) Will be trying to get screen calibrated but obviously a good screen to start off with is a bonus!

Stumbling point is a budget of around 500 pounds! Thanks in advance!

Vikki

I have a Toshiba. If you can get Windows 7 64bit. It is pretty fast. Also extra external memery in case eomething happens.

I don't know what the currency exchange is between pounds and usd, but I use a dell studio xps. It has the specs you need (4gb ram, 500gb hard drive, fast processor, 16" hi-def screen), , so photo editing is a pleasure.

£500 leaves you in the second hand market, I think.
My Sony vaio cost more than that and I think it's underpowered for photoshop.
Barely good enough for Lightroom.

You' re right about the RAM, and an external disk while slower than internal is a cost effective way to upgrade. Plus with two of them you can easily make a backup from one to the other - don't forget even if it's your only computer you should be making backup copies of all your important files!

Dell XPS of a spec I wanted was around £3000, but I was going for largest screen, most memory, windows 7 64 bit, solid state disk for boot, 1G disk for images... way over powered for the job - faster than my work computer in the office :)

Multi-core processor still isn't a major performance boost when running one program, but once you start multi-tasking running many programs it helps a lot. But not at the expense of raw speed, my 2.5GHz quad core workstation is slower than my 3GHz dual core desktop - because almost no programs I use are multi-threading effectively.