Hay guise! Been a while but it's good to be back! I am in the market for a laptop, and have several questions. All of these new lappys have Vista, so I am unsure as to how much video memory is necessary to run what I need to run for work and school. I need my laptop to be able to run Photoshop, Premier, and AfterEffects. I currently only have licenses for CS2 so that is what I would be using. Would a 1.7ghz C2D with 2gb of memory be able to handle this? What kind of price would I be looking at? I just want the bare minimum to be able to do work in those programs on the road. Should I be looking into a Mac also? Would it be worth it for me to just hold off on premier/aftereffects because of how expensive it would make the laptop in comparison to just having one to handle photoshop? Looking for help! I am sure there is stuff I have forgotten, but I'd like to know the answers to some of these Thanks guys, I really owe the bit-tech community so much for all they've helped me with. -Rob
Dude My Laptop is a Dell D610 with a Pentium M 1.6ghz and 512mb Ram and I can run CS3 and Sony Vegas. My Laptop has an x300 dedi mind you.
For 2D work (I recon Photoshop is 2D?) you don't need a huge graphic card... Actually, about any will do...
yeah, my lappy has a radeon X300 (Dell Inspiron 6000, Pentium M 2.0ghz, 2gb DDR2 533 RAM) and it runs Photoshop CS2, Autodesk Inventor, and pretty much any other graphics intensive program I throw at it.
I'm buying a "Small Business" laptop from Dell. The only options I'm really buying are the screen, CPU, and 8600 GT. I prefer to install 4GB of memory on my own (albeit at 667MHz) instead of paying $700 (seven hundred dollars) for Dell to do the same thing... So buy only what you can't replace at home if you want performance without overpaying.
I was just looking into the Vostros today. How would I buy/install memory into this laptop? I'm very computer literate but have never installed anything into a laptop, but have built multiple desktops. Oh and where would I find the best buy for that 4gb of memory? Is latency timings and such as important with C2D's? I'm very glad to hear from someone getting in the same boat as I am!
I have a HP dv6330ea with a 7400 Go and it seems to handle Vista, gaming and general stuff (photo editing, etc) really well. It's running on 2GB, rather than the 1GB it came with, which seems to help. It only has a T2050 Core Solo cpu but it runs blummin' quick enough for me! Remember if you get 4GB you'll need to be running Vista x64 to use all that ram - are each of the programs you want to run compatible with the 64-bit version of Vista?
It's pretty easy to install memory. I don't know about the Vostros, but for my Inspiron I bought 2gb of RAM from Newegg (probably the cheapest place, btw) and you just take out one screw from the cover on the bottom of the laptop, pull out the old cards, and slide the new cards in. They don't try to make it hard for you.
There's a cover at the bottom of about every laptop to access the memory modules--some uniquely heavy-duty laptops will require complete disassembly. Most laptops should only have two DIMM slots. I forgot to mention that I'll be running WinXP x64 as I do on my desktop. As mentioned by kenco_uk, you need a 64-bit operating system to utilize all four gigabytes of allocated memory, whereas standard 32-bit operating systems can address up to about three gigabytes. I should also mention that some laptops will require some BIOS fiddling for it to accept new memory modules. The newer Intel-powered laptops use Socket P processors. So, at your financial convenience, you can swap out the Celeron M (Socket P) you settled for, for a much more powerful Core2Duo T7n00 model later on. This will usually involve disassembling the laptop.
