Laptop for photographers

Overread · Aug 17, 2008

I think 32bit vista at least - simply won't deal with more RAM - it will just ignor it and can even crash with certain programs if it approaches its RAM max (ok only one program and its a game....................)

As for the university thinkpad -- probably as with all big education centres with a feature like that they are the cheapest retail laptops they can get -- so I am not surprised that they fail a lot (further 15000 people is a lot of people and booze to break a laptop

)

Easy_Target · Aug 17, 2008

I'm not surprised either. They probably get them at a wholesale bargain rate, but if it full out breaks and needs to be replaced, it comes out of our pocket at full retail price. The University pockets the difference. Big surprise.

photogmatt · Aug 17, 2008

Low end, Macbook
High end, Macbook Pro

McQueen278 · Aug 17, 2008

Nothing less than a Macbook. Buy a PC if you want to save a bunch of amazing pictures to your computer, only to have it infected with a crippling virus and lose everything.

Alpha · Aug 17, 2008

Lenovo is releasing a new laptop for photographers. It has a built-in tablet.

manaheim · Aug 17, 2008

Alpha said:
Lenovo is releasing a new laptop for photographers. It has a built-in tablet.

If Alpha wasn't blocking me, he'd see that I already said that. :er:

usayit · Aug 17, 2008

manaheim said:
If Alpha wasn't blocking me, he'd see that I already said that. :er:

My vote is MacBook Pro.

Parkerman · Aug 17, 2008

McQueen278 said:
Nothing less than a Macbook. Buy a PC if you want to save a bunch of amazing pictures to your computer, only to have it infected with a crippling virus and lose everything.

I've been using PC's my whole life, im 20, we got our first computer when i was 6. Never have we had a virus to wipe everything on our harddrive. We've had a small infection here and there, and over the past maybe 6 years of me having my own personal computer, I've never had a serious virus threat that wasn't fixed in like.. 2 min.

IMO only complete idiots get viruses.

Btw, did you happen to see where out of the Sony VAIO, Fujitsu U810, and MacBook Air. The macbook was hacked in less than 2 min?

Montana · Aug 18, 2008

Best laptop I have owned to date is my HP w/ Centrino Duo w/ 3 G with almost 300G of harddrive. Just get something fast and lots of memory. This thread can easily turn into a "my system is better than your system" war. LOL Most any decent laptop these days will handle your photostorage, viewing and processing with ease. If more memory is needed later, get an external harddrive to store on.

Derrick

Easy_Target · Aug 18, 2008

McQueen278 said:
Nothing less than a Macbook. Buy a PC if you want to save a bunch of amazing pictures to your computer, only to have it infected with a crippling virus and lose everything.

For the tech and commonsense illiterate yes. For those who exercise common sense when using a computer, it doesn't happen often. Or perhaps it was because someone clicked on that popup advertisement for "Dirty c*m guzzling sl*ts" and it brought you to a particularly nasty website? (pun intended)

I've been using computers since I was 8, I'm 22 now. I remember when 14k modems were blazing fast. I've had at least 15 computers from then until now. In that time, I've only gotten a total of maybe 10 viruses, none of which were system crippling. Even when I was a budding script kiddy and would visit IE exploit laden sites (netscape was the alternative) and used ICQ (earlier versions were script kiddy playgrounds), I never got infected by anything serious. Primarily because I used good judgement and was tech literate.

Parkerman said:
I've been using PC's my whole life, im 20, we got our first computer when i was 6. Never have we had a virus to wipe everything on our harddrive. We've had a small infection here and there, and over the past maybe 6 years of me having my own personal computer, I've never had a serious virus threat that wasn't fixed in like.. 2 min.

Hear hear.

F1addict · Aug 18, 2008

As much as I hate them, for photography and arts stuff in general get a Mac. They're way overpriced but you do get a great computer loaded with useful programs for what you'll be doing.
I'm kind of considering buying my friends macbook when he upgrades to a macbook pro. But my deep hatred of Macs is stopping me. I'd never buy a mac to replace a desktop but for a laptop they are great computers, also I know how to build a custom desktop and thats what I'm in the process of doing now (Really just extensively upgrading an old HP I bought from my friend for $100, so far new RAM and vid card and its running great but I still need to replace the whole mother board cpu and the ram...again and install a second hard drive to get it where I want, plus a new wide screen monitor) And you can't do all that stuff with a Mac. If I do buy my friends macbook I'll probably partition the hard drive and run Vista or Windows 7 when that comes out because I hate Macs operating system and everything I have now uses windows

.

BTW been useing PC's all my life except at school and I've never had a virus of any kind. 8 billion firewalls and antivirus programs FTW! :lol:

Mystwalker · Aug 18, 2008

Overread said:
you don't need Vista unless you play games -- that is really the only big reason.
Most stores will happily "downgrade" a computer from vista to xp if you ask them - and the current edition of xp is well supported, balanced and not as big a system hog.

Am not sur Microsoft gives us the choice nowadays. I heard they stopped selling XP so it's Vista or nothing. I will gladly PAY to "upgrade" to XP from Vista if it's available.

Positive of Vista is that the 64-bit version can support more then 3MB. I do not have PShop, but always hear that it will take as much RAM as you can afford to feed it. Having 8-16MB in system sounds like a good way to speed it up - max RAM I've seen in a notebook is 8MB.

To answer OP - if all you want is to view and store images while on the road, any notebook will work.

If you want to actually do photo stuff (Lightroom, PShop, DPP, etc ...), you want to look at CPU speed. That Lenovo has some NICE SPECs, but unless you want to multi-task, I doubt quad-core will be any faster then Core 2 Duo. If the photo application can take advantage of quad-core, it's a different story. Can PShop take advantage of quad-core?

Alpha · Aug 18, 2008

The MacBooks are a terrible choice for anyone working in PS on their laptop w/o a mouse or tablet. Everytime they release a new laptop w/o a right-click button I get more and more infuriated with their refusal to incorporate it in spite of its utility.

F1addict · Aug 18, 2008

Quad cores are useless today. From everything I've been told, there is nothing that can really take full advantage of a quad cores power that an average computer user would need. Maybe for things like 3D rendering there great but not for photo editing. A good dual core is all you'd ever need.

And there's not much wrong with Vista if you get the 64-bit version and have the power in your computer to support it. I've seen people complaining about it being slow but there trying to run it on 1gb of Ram, a slow cpu, and integrated video. XP doesn't even run very fast with that setup when running programs like photoshop. However Windows "7" (which is what they're calling it now) is supposed to be released in a little of a year or two now since Microsoft themselves have completely given up on Vista already.

And you can still buy XP if you know where to look. I believe newegg.com is still selling it. But they stopped making new XP discs back in June. And trying to find a computer with it would be difficult.

manaheim · Aug 18, 2008

F1addict said:
Quad cores are useless today. From everything I've been told, there is nothing that can really take full advantage of a quad cores power that an average computer user would need. Maybe for things like 3D rendering there great but not for photo editing. A good dual core is all you'd ever need.

And there's not much wrong with Vista if you get the 64-bit version and have the power in your computer to support it. I've seen people complaining about it being slow but there trying to run it on 1gb of Ram, a slow cpu, and integrated video. XP doesn't even run very fast with that setup when running programs like photoshop. However Windows "7" (which is what they're calling it now) is supposed to be released in a little of a year or two now since Microsoft themselves have completely given up on Vista already.

And you can still buy XP if you know where to look. I believe newegg.com is still selling it. But they stopped making new XP discs back in June. And trying to find a computer with it would be difficult.

There's a big jump from "most users won't get much use out of a quad core" to "quad cores are useless". Quad cores are absolutely not useless, though it's certainly possible that they may be overkill. I'm just starting to work with my dual quad core machine now, so I'll have some first hand experience on that in the coming weeks.

As far as Vista is concerned... it's a horrible piece of junk, seriously. Everyone in the industry is up in arms about it, and not just in the usual way that people complain about new OSes (everyone complained about XP as well)

Vista is bloated beyond bloat, it is ridiculously and annoyingly overprotective to a fault, it spends more time worrying about DRM and whether or not you're allowed to use your content, than it does actually allowing you to view it, etc.

The only thing good about it is that it's pretty and it handles multi-core procs better than XP does.