computer advise: am looking for a lap top strictly for photography. Will load software on it and go from there. Looking at a referb, cant really afford a new one. Can i get suggestions...

charles dyxin Loc: Joliet Illinois

am looking for a lap top strictly for photography. Will load software on it and go from there. Looking at a referb, cant really afford a new one. Can i get suggestions on a good brand and what I need?

ebbote Loc: Hockley, Texas

Welcome to the Forum Charles. There are many good laptops out there that will do the job that you want. Main thing is to get one with an Intel I7 processor, at least 8 gigs
of ram and the largest HD you can get on it and a good video card with at least 2 gigs of ram on it. Asus, Toshiba,
HP, Gateway or Dell will do very well. Finding one for the price you want will be the problem.

charles dyxin Loc: Joliet Illinois

thank you for the quick response, this narrows things down a lot, guess i will have to get more hours for this one.

Charlie

DavidPine Loc: Fredericksburg, TX

Welcome to UHH. I agree with the i7 and a minimum of 8GB RAM. Hard disk space doesn't matter much. A WD external drive will work well and is very inexpensive. I would suggest at least 2TB. Good luck.

charles dyxin wrote:

am looking for a lap top strictly for photography. Will load software on it and go from there. Looking at a referb, cant really afford a new one. Can i get suggestions on a good brand and what I need?

charles dyxin Loc: Joliet Illinois

since I am still learning, what do you mean by 2TB. Need to learn all I can

Thanks, Charlie

LaurenT Loc: Northern California

charles dyxin wrote:

since I am still learning, what do you mean by 2TB. Need to learn all I can

Thanks, Charlie

Since David is not online, I thought I'd answer your question. What he means is, get a WD external drive with 2TB of memory.

Nikon_DonB Loc: Chicago

charles dyxin wrote:

since I am still learning, what do you mean by 2TB. Need to learn all I can

Thanks, Charlie

A 2 terabyte(at least one for starters) External hard drive for storage. A terabyte is a thousand gigabytes. Check out Western Digital.

bsprague Loc: Lacey, WA, USA

charles dyxin wrote:

am looking for a lap top strictly for photography. Will load software on it and go from there. Looking at a referb, cant really afford a new one. Can i get suggestions on a good brand and what I need?

Previous posts seem to be ignoring the "afford a new" one part.

What you need depends on your software. All brands are acceptable. Each brand has both low price and high price models.

A popular example of software is Photoshop Elements. Adobe says the basic needs are 1.6GHz or faster processor, Microsoft Windows 7 or Windows 8 , 2GB of RAM and 5GB of available hard-disk space.

Almost anything sold in the last several years for Windows 7 will have enough horsepower. Within the family, my wife is using a 5 year old Sony laptop with an i5 CPU. My granddaughters are using a couple "hand me downs" as old or older with perfectly acceptable performance.

One granddaughter, not knowing her hand-me-down computer might be "weak", produced a composite video full of both clips and photos.

snipe Loc: Bitterroot Valley, Montana

charles dyxin wrote:

am looking for a lap top strictly for photography. Will load software on it and go from there. Looking at a referb, cant really afford a new one. Can i get suggestions on a good brand and what I need?

Welcome Charles,
I'm presently running an Asus gaming LP top with an external 2tb hard drive and have found it to be more than adequate for my photo editing. I have Elements 11, Lightroom 4.0, two noise softwares and two HDR softwares loaded on it, and have found no operating problems what so ever. Good luck...

ebbote Loc: Hockley, Texas

Nobody is ignoring the ops request, he specified a laptop to be used for photography and it takes more than a run of the mill laptop for that purpose. It is best for him to know
what he is getting into before hand and not make the mistake of getting one that will not do the job that he wants.

bsprague wrote:

Previous posts seem to be ignoring the "affor... (show quote)

bsprague Loc: Lacey, WA, USA

snipe wrote:

Welcome Charles,
I'm presently running an Asus gaming LP top with an external 2tb hard drive and have found it to be more than adequate for my photo editing. I have Elements 11, Lightroom 4.0, two noise softwares and two HDR softwares loaded on it, and have found no operating problems what so ever. Good luck...

I have one of those too. (ASUS Republic of Gamers G75VW-DS72, 2.3GHz Intel Core i7-3610QM Quad-Core, 16GB of DDR3 RAM
256GB SSD, 750GB 7200 RPM HDD)

I paid $2K for it so I could render video quickly. I have Photoshop AND Premier Elements, Lightroom 5.6, a dozen Topaz and NIK plugins and an HDR program. I have four multi TB hard drives.

My point is not that my computer is better than anyone elses. My point is that I've learned that the massive extra power of my Gamer is useful for video rendering. But, my old Toshiba budget laptop with a slow i5, 8 GB of memory and a slow 5200rpm internal drive works fine for photography.

I don't like typing in caps, but the OP said, HE/SHE IS LOOKING FOR A REFUB LAPTOP ON A BUDGET. The advice she/he is getting is that only top end stuff works!

bsprague Loc: Lacey, WA, USA

ebbote wrote:

Nobody is ignoring the ops request, he specified a laptop to be used for photography and it takes more than a run of the mill laptop for that purpose. It is best for him to know
what he is getting into before hand and not make the mistake of getting one that will not do the job that he wants.

My wife just bought a $400 HP Windows 7 laptop from Costco to run a client's Quicken bookkeeping accounts. It can do photograph software!

Charles is looking for what works at the entry level. Advice is going towards maximum performance with massive RAW files in Adobe CC applications.

He has yet to say what software he wants to run. If he is on the budget he says he's on, it might be the free GIMP. That software does not take a supercomputer to run!

charles dyxin Loc: Joliet Illinois

Thank you one and all, I now have to gather all the info, and make a decision. This is a great sight because you all have a lot of expertise and this is really helping me.

Charlie

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

charles dyxin wrote:

am looking for a lap top strictly for photography. Will load software on it and go from there. Looking at a referb, cant really afford a new one. Can i get suggestions on a good brand and what I need?

Charles, what is your budget? What software do you intend to use?

laptops without external displays are notoriously difficult to get good results because the screens lack enough color depth to accurately and faithfully display all the colors. Unless you spend $$$$ you are likely to get an underpowered laptop with less than optimum memory and a relatively small, slow hard drive.

If you are on a budget, you might want to consider a low cost desktop - more options and a better overall value.

Billyspad Loc: The Philippines

If your going to print your work then I agree a laptop screen is far from ideal but if you are happy to just show pictures via the net etc a laptop is fine.
If you run Photoshop and every imaginable plug in 2gb of ram will handle it with regular saving of your work.
Any decent make of laptop will do your job at this stage of your photography adventure. Get one two years old or less. Not convinced about the large external storage being required. Personally I never look at my old photos and save only what I feel is the best. Thats up to you. You can do an awful lot with basic stuff and save your cash.