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Need help choosing a laptop

Tags:
  • Laptops
  • Aspire
  • Computers
  • Electronic
  • Lenovo
Last response: in Laptop General Discussion
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October 17, 2014 7:54:20 AM

My sister's birthday is coming up and me and my mother wanted to buy her a laptop, so we went looking for computers at a local electronics store. We managed to narrow our choice down to 4 choices:

Acer Aspire E5-721
Lenovo G5070 (with the i3)
HP-rn006nl
Asus F550

My sister goes to an art school so she'll be needing something that can handle programs like photoshop smoothly enough, but aside from that she just needs something normal with a battery that lasts a decent amount and the capacity to play hd video. An optical disk drive is a plus but not a must.

More about : choosing laptop

October 17, 2014 8:04:30 AM

If you want to run photoshop with any sort of efficiency, you're going to want a much better laptop than what you have selected there.

http://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/system-requirements.ht...

Adobe recommends 8GB of RAM.

This is not to say those laptops there won't run the program, but it's going to be more frustrating than productive. I would try to increase your price point if you want to really hit the nail on the head.
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a b D Laptop
October 17, 2014 8:20:56 AM

You are going to have a hard time doing Adobe products on a $400 lappie. The requirements on the adobe site are ridiculously low.

From a cash standpoint, the Apple MacBook Pros excel here, especially as they include large student discounts. They are also quite durable....

http://store.apple.com/us-hed/browse/campaigns/educatio...


On the windows platform, I think you need to be in the $850 category.... something like this perhaps w/ a upgrade to 16GB to get thru the 4 years

http://www.lpc-digital.com/sager-np4658.html
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October 17, 2014 8:38:44 AM

Increasing the price point isn't exactly an option for us, unfortunately, could I maybe work around it by buying and installing additional RAM or would it be cheaper to buy a better computer? Even if it doesn't run the latest version of photoshop as smoothly as it could, maybe installing an older version or another problem could be an idea.
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October 17, 2014 8:47:17 AM

JackNaylorPE said:
You are going to have a hard time doing Adobe products on a $400 lappie. The requirements on the adobe site are ridiculously low.

From a cash standpoint, the Apple MacBook Pros excel here, especially as they include large student discounts. They are also quite durable....

http://store.apple.com/us-hed/browse/campaigns/educatio...


On the windows platform, I think you need to be in the $850 category.... something like this perhaps w/ a upgrade to 16GB to get thru the 4 years

http://www.lpc-digital.com/sager-np4658.html


It'd be nice if we could afford it, but unfortunately we have a 400 - 450 (really pushing it) euro budget. She's not going to necessarily be using photoshop, her teacher hasn't yet decided what program to use and I said photoshop for lack of knowledge on other image editing/graphics design programs.

Macs aren't an option since student discounts aren't offered in Italy and even if they were, I doubt they could bring a macbook pro into our price level.
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a b D Laptop
October 17, 2014 8:59:29 AM

The main problem with most of these laptops is the cpu and the ram. If you are going to do basic image editing then 4 gigs should be ok provided there is a good gpu. You could look at hp laptops with a quadrino series gpus as they are made for this tasks. Otherwise you could try the hp in the list and upgrade the ram but again the cpu may struggle as it is a ulv and not a m cpu.
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October 17, 2014 9:14:56 AM

velo3100 said:
The main problem with most of these laptops is the cpu and the ram. If you are going to do basic image editing then 4 gigs should be ok provided there is a good gpu. You could look at hp laptops with a quadrino series gpus as they are made for this tasks. Otherwise you could try the hp in the list and upgrade the ram but again the cpu may struggle as it is a ulv and not a m cpu.


Ok, so a dedicated gpu is better. That leaves the HP and Lenovo (I noticed I linked the g50 instead of the g5070 that we saw). At that point I think the Lenovo's better since the gpu has 2gb ram and it has a Haswell i3 vs the HP's Sandy Bridge though I could be wrong, especially on the gpu part that I know little about.

G5070 (4gb ram, AMD Radeon R5 M230 2GB, i3 cpu and 500 GB HDD
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a b D Laptop
October 17, 2014 9:18:43 AM

The hp is still better.
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October 17, 2014 9:21:36 AM

velo3100 said:
The hp is still better.


Ok, I'd like to know (mostly out of curiosity) why so?
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