mjmjam Loc: Michigan

Thanks for the info.

mjmjam Loc: Michigan

Thanks for the info

Bobbee

Yah know, I did that intentionally.

I set the trap and I caught my first animal!!!

now, you ready for it.

:-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D :-D

sirlensalot Loc: Arizona

Have found laptops to be the best overall tool for convenience if you plan on being mobile. Some have moved to tablets. If you think you do the majority of editing at home, desktop would be the most convenient and without argument the best option. Using a laptop now. Like me it struggles more and more, due to age, but still gets the job done with a little patience. Lol Refuse to replace it until it meets its demise.

sirlensalot Loc: Arizona

Have found laptops to be the best overall tool for convenience if you plan on being mobile. Some have moved to tablets. If you think you do the majority of editing at home, desktop would be the most convenient and without argument the best option. Using a laptop now. Like me it struggles more and more, due to age, but still gets the job done with a little patience. Lol Refuse to replace it until it meets its demise. Suggest using jerryc41 advice as a good guideline even if you have to adjust budget.

jeep_daddy Loc: Prescott AZ

What? I don't think the person wanting a laptop is wanting to use it to take pictures, but instead to edit them.

Bobbee

ahhhhhhhh, caught my second in the trap.

thelazya Loc: Wendell, MN

Not go with Asus?? I have the G73S; it does everything in Lightroom5 and PSE 12, not sure what your problem is with Asus.

Oknoder Loc: Western North Dakota

I know this response was not directed at me, but I tend to steer people who are not quite tech savvy away from Asus also. Asus makes a very fine product, but their user interface, though BIOs or UEFI is not what I would consider user friendly by any standard. Asus tends to direct most of its attention to gamers and for good reason, but on that note most gamers are fairly profiecent with the equipment they are using and can fix issues by looking at the debugging error codes. The average person would resort to calling the company for assistance, this is an area Asus is sorely lacking. There are many horror stories on the net about people with simple issues, such as just having to clear their CMOS, taking months and months for a tech to get back in touch with them that understood what the problem was and was willing to guide their customer through the process of resetting their bios/uefi. Most gamers tend to tinker around inside their box to make it perform to its utmost abilities so resetting the bios/uefi whether by use of an external button which most desktop mobos are coming equipped with or with moving a jumper on the board itself, or worse come to worse simply pulling the battery off the board with it disconnected from any other power source and cycling the power button a few times to drain any reserve power in the capacitors.

Then there is the issue of getting parts if something was to happen, it is next to impossible to get a new factory battery let alone a Hi-Res display, with or without the bezel, that tends to break easily. Even service techs tend to dislike them for this reason alone.

Oknoder Loc: Western North Dakota

In this instance, is when a laptop is acceptable, since all you really are doing is killing the boredom of riding a glorified greyhound. I also use mine in the field to control displays for people who want to be able to see the image immediately or to perform other simple tasks, like allieveate my boredom while out taking timed shots or timelapse photos, where the camera is basically on autopilot and you are there more to make sure your equipment does not grow legs and walk away.

I see people are mentioning Intel's i7 chips, these are nice but you would be hard pressed to find a laptop with one for under the OP's budget and even under a grand you are looking at a dual core or more probably a 1st or 2nd generation processor. I believe they into their 4th gen now with the Broadwell line to soon be released with DDR4 compatibility.

When you mention you have many programs on start up, I have to ask, are they all stuff you need to use from start to finish? I normally advise people to use microsoft's configuration utility (msconfig.exe) to disable all but the programs that need to run in the background at all times, such as antivirus and the like. I disable all programs and services that are not Microsoft's OS. Things like your graphics card user interface is not needed and if Catalyst needs something from its programing it will start that process when needed. Things like Switchboard or MSOffice do nothing but allocate CPU thread time and RAM, for processes that are not needed till that program is being used. With even the older SSDs you should be able to see start up times well under 10 seconds, but at that point we are simply splitting hairs. Sata3 SSDs are about to have the bottom fall away as far as pricing goes, with the integration of the M.2 standard. The M.2 is starting the opening salvo at around .50 cents per gig where a decent Sata3 drive is almost $1.00 a gig.

I got a great deal on a PCI-e SSD made by OCZ which performs over 200k iops compared to my 4 Samsung 840 pros if allowed to run in RAID0 will only put out about 150k. But brand new I think they were in the realm of $3-4 per gig. I paid pennies on the dollar and was quite impressed. Now it is used for my Lightroom Catalog and Photoshop scratch disk.

Bobbee

I do Integration with that big colorful global company. I go to customer sites and do anything from soup to nuts. So on a good day I am plugging 3-4 stacks together to talk to each other and this goes anywhere from ESB to Databases to Mobile to Rules engines to webservices to.......you get the picture. I found when you start playing with msconfig to start up and shut down things you are fighting invisible monsters at some point or another and miss the mark. I agree with you on the OP. You certainly can get a desktop cheaper. But the mobility ends right there. Even when I do engagements, my laptop is there with me. If I have a second shooter with me, their card goes in the reader and onto my laptop BEFORE they leave my presence. I believe in Murphy.

For me, I just have one, big damn laptop. It comes free every year. Bleeding edge , front of the curve, top of the wave stuff. The consideration is to do my job, I need octane.......and a Stella Artois with my dinner. So you are right, for me I don't worry about price. Love my job!!!! Both of them.

Oknoder Loc: Western North Dakota

I wish I could say I love my job, but in all honesty all I do is show up daily to fund an addiction that dominates my thoughts while at work anyways. LOL I do have to admit that the job does have its perks. I recently got to upgrade our workstation's graphics cards. My boss wanted to upgrade the quad firepro V8800s for a couple of the newer cards. He wanted to use the w7000 series and I was adamant about the w9100s he began discussing the cost, to which I retorted that they were the same price and the W9100s would out perform almost any other card on the market to date, while the W5100s were barely an upgrade, and would need to be changed out in three or four years if our present growth rate stays basically the same.

He couldn't figure out how I could get the W9100 for the same price as the w7000. I simply went to newegg threw 4 of the cards of my choice into the cart, told him to watch close, I pulled out my company credit card and told him either way we went we would still have the same amount of money on us than we did when we showed up. He did not find it as amusing as I did. In the end I was able to "re-appropriate" three of the four AMD Firepro V8800 cards to run in my main processing rig with the understanding I would now be able to do work at home. I rarely do work while I am at work, not sure why I would save it, to do on my own personal time.

Mjmjam, I apologize about hijacking your thread, and to answer your question, within your budget I would probably go to a site like Newegg or Tigerdirect and look at factory refurbished/openbox models. To start the hunt its all about the processor, its speed is one of the main signifier but make sure you take notice of the amount of cores/threads and the on-die ram specified by L2 and L3 cache. Based on your price and the quickly changing mobile CPU socket types you will probably not have much wiggle. Look for at least 4g of DDR3 ram, and here you will ideally want as much as you can afford in one DIMM, so there is only one ram chip installed which will leave you one empty one for future upgrade if desired. Most laptops only offer the use of 2 DIMMs for ram where as desktops offer 4-8 DIMMs per processor socket.

If all you are doing is surfing the web, checking email and viewing and some mild PPing like cropping and straightening horizons, you should easily be able to find a machine that will suit your needs, within your budget. Just a personal opinion but Intel will be the most powerful, but AMD socket offers the best bang for the buck, especially when crossfired with a graphics card, similar to what gamers are looking for. Now since Adobe has changed its tactics from offering Nvidia prime support by supporting CUDA over any other format. But now they are using OpenGL which is AMDs open source format which everyone can use so you are not limited to only one brand of Graphical processor. When you finally have your choice narrowed down to a choice that seems to be ideal, run to google and search the net for issues or problems users have benn having. Reviews are nice, but must be taken with a grain of salt, considering that they make a large portion of their income based on advertising the same equipment they are giving you a review on. In my opinion this blurs the line of being biased or not. But I do trust in the comman man to bitch and complain when something goes wrong in their new machine.

IF you presently already have a laptop I would consider building a desktop that can be upgraded as you go, with only components that will be helpful for you and what you are using the rig for, while freeing up a mobile PC which drags/locks up when doing heavy tasks such as PP, but works fine for viewing photos and uploading them to the web.

Hope some of this helps out in your endeavor.
Matthew

GPoyner Loc: North Dakota

Actually there is an i7 at Best Buy that is just under $800.00 http://www.bestbuy.com/site/hp-envy-x360-2-in-1-15-6-touch-screen-laptop-intel-core-i7-8gb-memory-1tb-hard-drive-natural-silver/6647029.p?id=1219231129104&skuId=6647029&st=categoryid$pcmcat247400050000&cp=1&lp=3
Now needless to say it is not a SSD (from what I see) and I would look further into the graphics card (I am by no means a computer person, so it may meet the needs). But it does have an 8 GB memory and a 1 TB drive.

I have an i7 and love it....sadly within a year or so I might have to upgrade, but I have no issues doing layers and having multiple programs up at the same time. Thanks GPoyner

PS - the only reason I know about this one is that I need to look for something for my kids.

Oknoder Loc: Western North Dakota

I have always leaned my biases towards Intel for quite some time, I left AMD back when Intel started using the 64bit architecture that AMD developed. I only recently went with a full AMD rig and love how adjustable the chipsets are for tweaking and overclocking. Intel has started doing a few shady things when it comes to their processors. The example you posted is a great example. They just label the CPU as an Intel i7 4th gen, but fail to notify the buyer/user that there are currently somewhere around 50 different variations of this CPU I would be willing to bet paychecks the model installed in this system is the dual core version, and with the add being vague it is probably the unit that intel locks the multiplier so the user cannot adjust the clock speed of the processor. Also your example is almost 200 dollars over budget.

As an example I believe my CPU, the FX8350 has a base speed of 3.8 or 4.0 with a turbo boost to 4.2. But since none of the cores are locked I can slowly adjust my multiplier up, slowly to 4.1 then 4.2 and so on till it crashes or refuses to post or boot. Next I will bump the voltage supplied to the CPU up by .05 of a volt or so and try again. All the while keeping an eye on the temps of both the CPU cores and the socket on the motherboard. I got mine rock stable at 5.2 and does decent at 5.3 with a voltage of 1.43, all by tweaking the multiplier and voltage till it refuses to run stable. Stability benchmark tests will stress your system to its limits all in hopes of making it crash. I don't know about all the FX boards but I went with a cheaper option, coming from Asrock but it allows a large amount of flexibility in being able to adjust my CPU, Ram and even GPU if I wanted. Stable voltage and proper cooling are the only key factors. and patience, with a lot of repetition.

Erik_H Loc: Denham Springs, Louisiana

And I thought that seeing people taking pictures with an iPad looked funny!