I use 2 Western Digital "My Passport" portable hard drives purchased from Costco online ($140 Canadian). One Red and one Blue and take one of them on the road often. Since I am into macro photography and focus stacking I take a huge amount of images that need to be taken off the Camera SD cards often while traveling. With the other hard drive in a safe place at home I feel "safe". Once back at home I use the free Bulk Rename Utility to properly name the digital files before copying them to the second Hard Drive.

I am not sure about the quality of Dell hardware components, but they do stand behind their products with free support, and they are accessible 24/7.

My concerns are 1: Portability - I often travel and end up in a hotel room after a photoshoot to unload my camera and do some preliminary editing . 2: Screen Glare: - I have been frustrated with the reflective glare from my current laptop screen. 3: Interrupted work flow: - I would like a significant performance improvement mainly for Photomerge and HDR, because I feel I am being interrupted, and am wasting time in an uncomfortable hotel room.

One consideration that might come into play in the near future is video editing. I have seen some short video's where the essence of a location is enhanced over and above a still picture.

Good point Bob,
I have recently purchased a Canon 5DS which produces 50 MB to 70 MB images. Focus stacking is very slow on this laptop. HDR and Panoramas are somewhat acceptable, but I still use the processing time to pour myself a coffee and read the newspaper, especially with focus stacking.

Thanks for a reality check ATCurry
The blinders definitely come up when looking at new shiny laptops with an "edge". I really liked the LED lit keyboard. The enthusiasm of the sales person demonstrating the fantastic graphics capabilities was a factor too. I am also impressed with the matte screen, my laptop has an annoying glare during certain times of the day.

Thanks DavidM,
I will have a look at your suggestions.

Good point Gene!

"you'll want a 512 GB SSD NVMe m.2 drive, a 7200 rpm 1 TB hard drive, an NVidia Quadro Graphics card"

Thanks Gene,
The links are very helpful. I will have a look at the NVIDIA Quadro specs. The second row onwards, of MSI laptops is a bit out of my budget. I noticed all of the higher end MSI laptops have 8GB or more of Video RAM. Would 6GB of Video RAM be limiting for photography?

Thanks Rick, I have not considered any Mac Laptop products, always thought they were too thin and fragile for my thick fumble fingers. Maybe I should widen my search.

I am considering buying a new laptop, and was wondering if a gaming laptop by MSI would be a good choice, or if it is overkill for just photography. I use Photoshop CS6 and have been a bit frustrated with the processing time assembling panoramas, doing HDR and macro focus stacking, also glare from the screen is a problem sometimes. I currently have a laptop with an Intel i7 processor, 8 GB ram and and SSD drive. I am considering a gaming laptop with a Core i7-7700HQ processor, 16 GB ram, 256 GB M.2 SSD and a 1 TB HDD, a 15.6in Full HD matte monitor, GTX video card and Windows 10 Home. I have been told the the M.2 SSD standard is much faster than a regular SSD. Another consideration is portability. Some of the MSI laptops are HUGE and have all kinds of gaming features that I probably will never use. Does anyone have experience and/or advice.

I tried to add an addendum to my earlier post, but it disappeared in the "aether". Here is my second try, a detail comparison of before and after "despeckle" in CS6

(Download)

Image can be improved significantly in Photoshop CS6 by using - Filter - Noise - Despeckle

(Download)