* New laptop for photoshop

K
Posted By
Kathy
Feb 3, 2009
Views
742
Replies
19
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Closed
Hello There:

I am going to learn Photoshop (Cs3 version) to be able to improve my family photos as a hobby

and since I travel often, I am going to buy a newer laptop for this purpose.(Windows environment)

My friend was telling me that Intel processor is better than Amd and make sure it has a dedicated

video card rather than built-in. I could afford expending around $700 (maybe $800). Would I be

able to get something nice for that amount? Any brand? Any advice? I heard that Dell are overpriced,

is that so?

Thank you in advance,

Kathy

Must-have mockup pack for every graphic designer πŸ”₯πŸ”₯πŸ”₯

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J
Joel
Feb 3, 2009
"Kathy" wrote:

Hello There:

I am going to learn Photoshop (Cs3 version) to be able to improve my family photos as a hobby

and since I travel often, I am going to buy a newer laptop for this purpose.(Windows environment)

My friend was telling me that Intel processor is better than Amd and make sure it has a dedicated

video card rather than built-in. I could afford expending around $700 (maybe $800). Would I be

able to get something nice for that amount? Any brand? Any advice? I heard that Dell are overpriced,

is that so?

Thank you in advance,

I don’t run Photoshop on laptop but one of my grand-daughter runs Photoshop and other Adobe aps like InDesign (sheis using CS3 as her boss doesn’t wanna upgade to CS4), and she seems doing fine with it.

What I would suggest is getting plenty of memory as Photoshop loves memory. And I have seen the price of quite afew nice laptops have dropped quite abit, like the one I paid around $1000 2 years ago now around $600

Just make sure the memory can be expanded to at least 4GB or so. Cuz some may limit to 1GB and some limits to 2GB

P.S. My grand-daughter is still in college but the company she started as summer job likes her work so they continue to hire her as graphic designer. And she work through internet as she studies in a univercity almost 900 miles from company she works for.

Kathy
BL
Bob LaBlawgh
Feb 4, 2009
I’ve run CS3 on two different XP laptops, both with 2G RAM, one with on board graphics, the other with Nvidea graphics card. This is plenty. Of course, more RAM is better, and you’ll need 4G if it’s a Vista machine.

Get yourself a couple of USB external drives to store all the tuts, photos, other stuff you’ll make and use the laptops Data drive for the stuff you use every day.
JJ
John J
Feb 4, 2009
Bob LaBlawgh wrote:
I’ve run CS3 on two different XP laptops, both with 2G RAM, one with on board graphics, the other with Nvidea graphics card. This is plenty. Of course, more RAM is better, and you’ll need 4G if it’s a Vista machine.
Get yourself a couple of USB external drives to store all the tuts, photos, other stuff you’ll make and use the laptops Data drive for the stuff you use every day.

Nobody has answered your question regarding the graphics card – and neither can I – but I raise this issue for clarification for the two of us.

One of my laptops is a Toshiba Portege M700 which does fine for CS3 but it is absolutely inadequate with certain other applications that use the graphics card intensively.

I’d like to settle the graphics card question. Perhaps you could save a few dollars.
K
keepout
Feb 4, 2009
On Tue, 3 Feb 2009 16:23:29 -0500, "Kathy" wrote:

make sure it has a dedicated
video card rather than built-in. I could afford expending around $700 (maybe $800). Would I be able to get something nice for that amount? Any brand? Any advice? I heard that Dell are overpriced,

Google high performance laptop.

Off the rack starts at $1000.00. From there the price just gets steeper. Tack on a $999.00 piece of software, and you get the picture about your $700.00 – $800.00 price range…
Even Walmart can’t offer a laptop for that price that can do anything..

How old of a PS software are you thinking of using ?
What I think is the best improvement is for PS4,
quote from the web site ‘Some GPU-accelerated features require graphics support for Shader Model 3.0 and OpenGL 2.0’
the use of the video cards gpu vs machines cpu.. This right here takes the wait out of almost every function..
I tried the rotation, zoom of a 29,000 x 35,000 pixel image. It was instantaneous with the gpu usage. Just moving something that size [1.8 gigs] in the fastest 3.2 ghz CPU would take a half hour.
It zoomed, and rotated with no jitter. Moved like a thumbnail.. Oh I also have a 1 gig ram video card vs the smaller 512 or less. That along with the 2 gig ram, makes this thing a whole lot larger in memory than most machines.
K
Kathy
Feb 4, 2009
Thank you all for your replies.

Kathy

====================

wrote in message
On Tue, 3 Feb 2009 16:23:29 -0500, "Kathy" wrote:

make sure it has a dedicated
video card rather than built-in. I could afford expending around $700 (maybe
$800). Would I be able to get something nice for that amount? Any brand? Any advice? I heard
that Dell are overpriced,

Google high performance laptop.

Off the rack starts at $1000.00. From there the price just gets steeper. Tack
on a $999.00 piece of software, and you get the picture about your $700.00 – $800.00 price range…
Even Walmart can’t offer a laptop for that price that can do anything..

How old of a PS software are you thinking of using ?
What I think is the best improvement is for PS4,
quote from the web site ‘Some GPU-accelerated features require graphics support
for Shader Model 3.0 and OpenGL 2.0′
the use of the video cards gpu vs machines cpu.. This right here takes the wait
out of almost every function..
I tried the rotation, zoom of a 29,000 x 35,000 pixel image. It was instantaneous with the gpu usage. Just moving something that size [1.8 gigs] in
the fastest 3.2 ghz CPU would take a half hour.
It zoomed, and rotated with no jitter. Moved like a thumbnail.. Oh I also have a 1 gig ram video card vs the smaller 512 or less. That along with the 2 gig ram, makes this thing a whole lot larger in memory than most machines.
G
gowanoh
Feb 4, 2009
The facts:
Photoshop will not benefit from the use of a dedicated graphics card in a laptop, period, end of discussion.
There are scads of sub-$800 Windows laptops that will run CS3 without difficulty.
Realize that all laptops, including Apples, are built on the same limited generic parts.
I have a laptop with better components than the best Apple Macbook pro for less than half the cost.
Look for the fastest Intel Core Duo processor and a machine with at least 3 gbs of RAM.
One problem is that too many vendors are loading these machines with Vista 64. It is an unfortunate fact that many peripherals do not have drivers for Vista 64 or their Vista 64 drivers are less functional than their Vista 32 counterparts (which in many cases are less functional than their XP counterparts) so plan ahead.
In today’s economy you can find amazing sales on notebooks in this price class . . .
K
keepout
Feb 5, 2009
On Wed, 4 Feb 2009 14:09:42 -0800, "trouble" wrote:

The facts:
Photoshop will not benefit from the use of a dedicated graphics card in a laptop, period, end of discussion.
Way too generic. My Vista HP has run PSCS3 & CS4. both with the onboard crap video card, and the 1 gig ram Nvideo 8500 video card. the onboard had no GPU. the Nvidia does. The GPU would make no difference with CS3. But the extra RAM could.

the difference is as different as night & day. You can see it instantly just by looking at the WEI. It jumped from 2.5 to 4.7. And that was only limited by the speed of the CPU. A faster CPU would have brought the WEI up even higher.

Yes a video card, vs onboard video CAN make a HUGE difference with CS4. And in my opinion if you’ve got nothing better to do than sit and wait for a machine to catch up with you, that’s fine, no need for a separate video card. But if production is the goal, you need a video card that produces.

Anything that avoids pagefile drive access is an improvement.
J
Joel
Feb 5, 2009
Without some quote of the *original* most people can’t figure out what your response to.
BL
Bob LaBlawgh
Feb 5, 2009
Joel wrote:
Without some quote of the *original* most people can’t figure out what your response to.

Quoting a mile long thread in the 10th or 12th response isn’t the asnwer either.
With a threaded view, and Message selection set to Threads with Unread, it’s pretty simple to track the conversation.
Jumping into a new :re thread, one wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) expect to get the whole gist.
J
Joel
Feb 5, 2009
Bob LaBlawgh wrote:

Joel wrote:
Without some quote of the *original* most people can’t figure out what your response to.

Quoting a mile long thread in the 10th or 12th response isn’t the asnwer either.
With a threaded view, and Message selection set to Threads with Unread, it’s pretty simple to track the conversation.
Jumping into a new :re thread, one wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) expect to get the whole gist.

I agree with all your points.
BL
Bob LaBlawgh
Feb 5, 2009
Joel wrote:
Bob LaBlawgh wrote:

Joel wrote:
Without some quote of the *original* most people can’t figure out what your response to.
Quoting a mile long thread in the 10th or 12th response isn’t the asnwer either.
With a threaded view, and Message selection set to Threads with Unread, it’s pretty simple to track the conversation.
Jumping into a new :re thread, one wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) expect to get the whole gist.

I agree with all your points.

Wow! A nice, gentlemanly, reasonable, adult response to a Usenet post. Thanks, Joel. There are a few other posters who might see this as instructive.


Bob LaBlawgh
β€œIt’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”
K
Kathy
Feb 5, 2009
Hello everyone:

Thank you all for your help.

I just found a laptop in Best Buy (see link below) that I like

very much and it is priced right ($699). It has 4GB memory(expandable to 8GB)

and the ATI video memory will go up to 1918mb of shared memory. I think I’m

going to buy it.

Regards,

\Kathy

HP Pavilion $699

AMD TurionT X2 RM-72 Dual-Core Mobile Processor

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=9166635&ty pe=product&id=1218041148373&ref=10&loc=01

======== ============================================

Hello There:

I am going to learn Photoshop (Cs3 version) to be able to improve my family photos as a hobby and since I travel often, I am going to buy a newer laptop for this
purpose.(Windows environment)

My friend was telling me that Intel processor is better than Amd and make sure it has a dedicated video card rather than built-in. I could afford expending

around $700 (maybe $800). Would I be able to get something nice for that amount?

Any brand? Any advice? I heard that Dell are overpriced, is that so?

Thank you in advance,

Kathy
JJ
John J
Feb 6, 2009
On Wed, 4 Feb 2009 14:09:42 -0800, "trouble" wrote:
The facts:
Photoshop will not benefit from the use of a dedicated graphics card in a laptop, period, end of discussion.

I want that to be true, but does not CS4 look to the graphics card for 3D rendering?
J
Joel
Feb 6, 2009
Bob LaBlawgh wrote:

Joel wrote:
Bob LaBlawgh wrote:

Joel wrote:
Without some quote of the *original* most people can’t figure out what your response to.
Quoting a mile long thread in the 10th or 12th response isn’t the asnwer either.
With a threaded view, and Message selection set to Threads with Unread, it’s pretty simple to track the conversation.
Jumping into a new :re thread, one wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) expect to get the whole gist.

I agree with all your points.

Wow! A nice, gentlemanly, reasonable, adult response to a Usenet post. Thanks, Joel. There are a few other posters who might see this as instructive.

Those are the rules I have been trying to follow for years.
K
keepout
Feb 6, 2009
On Thu, 5 Feb 2009 18:36:42 -0500, "Kathy" wrote:

HP Pavilion $699

AMD TurionT X2 RM-72 Dual-Core Mobile Processor

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=9166635&ty pe=product&id=1218041148373&ref=10&loc=01

======== ============================================
You’ve got my vote just being HP. Hope you never need support, but I’ve found that HP along with Walmart support can’t be beat by any companies.

Not so sure about ATI though. I was an involuntary Beta tester for 10 years with ATI.

I read the review specifically aimed at the graphics. It would seem that it CAN benefit from a plugin video card. I’d say shop around now for one. My machine was a year old when I went shopping for a video card. Computer tech really does fly. The new stuff was technically out of reach for this 1 year old machine. I had to settle on a card going into obsolescence.
For PS4 get a card with a good GPU. And as much ram as you can find. All those speed complaints could be traced to the DDR2 memory. If you could have a Ferrari or a model T, which would you choose ? DDR2 is the model T of memory. The reason for DDR2 is price.
Disregard.. Reading the specs, you’re STUCK with that video card. It does have the required GPU. So maybe PS4 can use it.

Maybe being owned by another company will clean up ATI’s act. I read all the reviews. There were a few sour apples. and the main one being speed. One guy showed how to get it to a good speed. Disable all the crap installed in the startup. Then reboot & fly.
The extremely hot power adapter sounds like real trouble.

I have no idea about battery life. 2 hours doesn’t sound like much to me. to me, it’d be dead before breakfast.

I’ve never owned & don’t intend on having a laptop requiring batteries. Only thing I use batteries on is the TV remotes. I just threw out 10 AA’s that I never even got to use.

Hmm… checking out the video specs, there’s a glitch. It reports only 256 mb. 256mb video ram was good in 1998. Dxdiag shows the 1918MB available. Didn’t dig into why the anomaly since it wasn’t spelled out as to what the 2 meant.

Ouch. NO INTERNAL slots. Except for the expansion to 8 gigs ram, it looks like WYSIWYG.

I think limiting yourself to selection by price may bite you.. That 4gb ram is flash.. to hide all the drawbacks. A 320 GB HD isn’t a lot for graphics usage. I’m at 2 tera bytes drive space now and 2 gigs ram. 1st being, a laptop for a graphics machine ? Graphics eats up HD space faster than anything else. It also eats up RAM. Graphics usage requires a power horse, not a dog cart.

No expansion slots, only 4 USB slots, [I have 4 on the back, 4 on an external USB island, and a single USB on the front. And there’s only 3 free. no TV tuner, slow 5400 rpm Sata drive, another thing to slow things down. I’ve been spoiled with a 3.2ghz Pentium processor, and now a 2.8 ghz dual core on Vista HP. This 2.1 ghz AMD shows 50/50 reviews.

With high tech, you really can’t trust the salesman. they just want to sell the goods and get their commission. They most likely don’t know any more than you do.

The dealers manufacture items BY price that are really little more than the bare minimums, and cheapest materials. This laptop is the bare minimum.. Not real sure about why anyone mentions fingerprints as a drawback, or why the machine comes with a special cloth to wipe fingerprints..

Unreadable keyboard.. This sounds like an odd problem if it hadn’t bit me with my old machine. I took the keyboard on my special build back the next day, It seems there is such a thing as a children’s keyboard that DOESN’T sell and gets stuck on things as one more example of installing the cheapest, and un able to sell items.

If price is the selling point, I’d say go for it. You probably can’t find one cheaper. I’m wondering if Vista 64 isn’t one of those [can’t give it away items]. It is true that 64 bit drivers are few and far between. You need to make sure PS3 can even run on Vista 64.
If I were shopping for a laptop, I’d pass on this one.. Too many limitations. I read the gripes over the praise. I do know that a lot of those gripes should be taken with a grain of salt due to user ignorance. But you can’t ignore a hot adapter, slow everywhere, battery life, and visual problems..

I spent 2 weeks 8 hour days shopping online JUST for this video card. But I’m more than happy with the video card.

Hello There:

I am going to learn Photoshop (Cs3 version) to be able to improve my family photos as a hobby and since I travel often, I am going to buy a newer laptop for this
purpose.(Windows environment)

My friend was telling me that Intel processor is better than Amd and make sure it has a dedicated video card rather than built-in. I could afford expending

around $700 (maybe $800). Would I be able to get something nice for that amount?

Any brand? Any advice? I heard that Dell are overpriced, is that so?

Thank you in advance,

Kathy
K
keepout
Feb 6, 2009
On Thu, 05 Feb 2009 19:45:46 -0600, John J wrote:

On Wed, 4 Feb 2009 14:09:42 -0800, "trouble" wrote:
The facts:
Photoshop will not benefit from the use of a dedicated graphics card in a laptop, period, end of discussion.

I want that to be true, but does not CS4 look to the graphics card for 3D rendering?
Think about that for just a second..
Photoshop = [PROFESSIONAL] GRAPHICS
paint = graphics
And there’s several industries dedicated JUST to graphics cards. A computer is a GRAPHIC display of data. EVERYTHING about a computer depends on a good graphic display. The faster the better. Just jump into one of these gaming forums, and see just how much research dollar is spent on graphics cards JUST for gaming.

It’s a ridiculous statement that PS will not benefit from a dedicated graphics card. That’s why they’ve gone so far as to combine dual graphics cards with ATI & Nvidia. PS now uses the graphics cards GPU’s for speed.

For general use, FREE Paint would work. If you’re going to spend $1000.00 or more on graphics software, why would you trust it to a $50.00 graphics card ?
JJ
John J
Feb 6, 2009
wrote:
On Thu, 05 Feb 2009 19:45:46 -0600, John J wrote:

On Wed, 4 Feb 2009 14:09:42 -0800, "trouble" wrote:
The facts:
Photoshop will not benefit from the use of a dedicated graphics card in a laptop, period, end of discussion.
I want that to be true, but does not CS4 look to the graphics card for 3D rendering?
Think about that for just a second..
Photoshop = [PROFESSIONAL] GRAPHICS
paint = graphics
And there’s several industries dedicated JUST to graphics cards. A computer is a GRAPHIC display of data. EVERYTHING about a computer depends on a good graphic display. The faster the better. Just jump into one of these gaming forums, and see just how much research dollar is spent on graphics cards JUST for gaming.

You don’t understand. Of course images have to be rendered by the graphics card to bring them to the display. However, the photoshop program (code) does not have to use specific graphics firmware (GPU) to COMPUTE. It did that in the code until CS4, and then only for certain routines, in particular 3D computations.

Of course games require powerful graphics processors. They depend upon 3D which is best done in firmware, and also high-level software (meaning time-expensive in terms of CPU cycles.) More speed, more firmware is a good thing there. CS is not yet employing a whole lot of GPU processing for computations.

It’s a ridiculous statement that PS will not benefit from a dedicated graphics card. That’s why they’ve gone so far as to combine dual graphics cards with ATI & Nvidia. PS now uses the graphics cards GPU’s for speed.

Migrating routines to GPU processors does not happen overnight. CS4 does not use it for many routines – yet. I’m sure it will, but I have to defer to their programmers who are committed to stability, standards that will carry us down the road reliably.
K
keepout
Feb 6, 2009
On Fri, 06 Feb 2009 11:25:29 -0600, John J wrote:

You don’t understand. Of course images have to be rendered by the graphics card to bring them to the display. However, the photoshop program (code) does not have to use specific graphics firmware (GPU) to COMPUTE. It did that in the code until CS4, and then only for certain routines, in particular 3D computations.

I understand just fine.. the onboard video card I have is barely useful. I added a GT 8500 and watched everything change. Not the least being CS4.

ok assuming you’re using CS3. Take a 29,000 x 32,000 pixel image, and zoom and rotate it.

Chances are you’ll give up trying to rotate or zoom it. That’s a 1.5 gig image. I’ve worked with 24 layers in CS3. Changing from one to the other is a pain in itself.
If layers benefit from the changes in CS using the GPU vs CPU that’s just one more reason for a better card.

Try the same in CS4.. It moves instantaneously.
Though saving an image that size still takes forever.

Of course games require powerful graphics processors. They depend upon 3D which is best done in firmware, and also high-level software (meaning time-expensive in terms of CPU cycles.) More speed, more firmware is a good thing there. CS is not yet employing a whole lot of GPU processing for computations.
It uses the GPU vs CPU which speeds up everything. It doesn’t touch computer ram as long as the video ram is enough. Less drive swapping = faster speeds.

It’s a ridiculous statement that PS will not benefit from a dedicated graphics card. That’s why they’ve gone so far as to combine dual graphics cards with ATI & Nvidia. PS now uses the graphics cards GPU’s for speed.

Migrating routines to GPU processors does not happen overnight. CS4 does not use it for many routines – yet. I’m sure it will, but I have to defer to their programmers who are committed to stability, standards that will carry us down the road reliably.
All I can say is when the WEI doubles in speed for ALL things, adding memory is no longer the best thing you can do with your machine to increase its productivity. Check out one of these WEI brag web sites. The one at MS is just one. Whether you can believe the numbers [5.9, mine is 4.7 for CPU max speed], is another thing. the WEI page on your HD is an XML page that you can modify those numbers any ways you want.
But it does give you an idea as to what sort of machines are out there, and what they can do.
My out of the box WEI with this machine was 2.x.

The fact that PS4 now makes use of the GPU is a big deal for productivity. Before CS4, you needed a super fast CPU with loads of memory, and a video card with loads of memory and speed just to keep from falling asleep while it did it’s job. No more..

If you want to see a test bench of the NEW CS4, try
http://revision3.com/pixelperfect/ and watch the new cs4 shows he’s created there’s 2 or 3 of them. Try the LARGE quick time movies. the small ones are too blurry.
If you have CS3, try and keep up..
This guy uses HUGE images, and lots of layers. I don’t think the fact he works on a MAC has any bearing. I had instant results on vista HP.
MR
Mike Russell
Feb 11, 2009
Fine looking system, Kathy, particularly the dual core and extra memory capacity. Keep your old display around as you can plug it into your notebook for more working space.

Mike Russell – http://www.curvemeister.com

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