Laptop advice needed please.

TakeThis

Pinkypants wrote: »

Thanks for that Dave. But did you never dodge or burn in the darkroom? Make the picture slightly brighter or darker in the darkroom?

I've not spent a penny yet on equipment apart from my camera and lenses.

I work with RAW files which can be edited wonderfully and quite simply with the correct equipment, ie half decent pc and lightroom.

I used have the same mindset as you, until I spent some time learning what can be done and how to do it. My results are improving month on month.

The windows 7 version I have is 64 bit only, CPU is not designed for that so that's out the window, looks like 2gb RAM is most I can go to. So it's off to save and get a new laptop as and when.

Many Thanks to all those have replied.

That's not quite right. The key is the same for either 32bit or 64bit. So if you have a legitimate key, then you need only download the corresponding 32bit image and to burn it to disc. Easily done.

Notmyrealname

Pinkypants wrote: »

I'm really getting into photography and don't think my ageing dual core 1.7ghz with 2gb ram running Vista is much up to the job.

Why not? My wife uses a similar CPU spec desktop at work for designing signs and large posters. I can guarantee she's using file sizes bigger than you will be when she's doing posters. 16GB is not uncommon.

RAM is the most important thing followed by a fast hard drive in regards to speed.

The next problem and the biggest for anyone is the monitor. She has a calibration device which alters the settings of contrast, colour etc to ensure that what is on the screen matches the actual colours as much as possible and even then its not infallible to the point where she has a printout of around a couple of dozen rows of colours and the colour code they correspond to. So when she wants a red in a certain tone, she uses the code on the chart to ensure that what comes out of the printer is what she wants. Its quite surprising how different it looks on the screen to the outputted image.

If you want a laptop for image editing, you're not going to find one with a good enough screen on it in PC World unless it has the Apple logo on and even then you want to be looking at the ones with the matte screen and not the glossy one.

Notmyrealname

Pinkypants wrote: »

Laptop can take max out at 4gb RAM and guess next step if need be would be SSD hard drive. But will I be wasting my time and money. When for around £329 I can get 6gb RAM, 2.0 dual core new laptop.

The dual core processors in those are basically Celerons with a low L2 Cache which seriously hits speed. The CPU in yours is faster. The screens are low quality crap certainly not good enough for photo editing as they have poor contrast and brightness and not very accurate colour reproduction. And they're glossy screens which will drive you mad.

Pinkypants

TakeThis wrote: »

That's not quite right. The key is the same for either 32bit or 64bit. So if you have a legitimate key, then you need only download the corresponding 32bit image and to burn it to disc. Easily done.

Many thanks.

Didn't know that, yeap 100% sure is a legit key, but the dvd does say 64bit software.

I'll have a go at trying to download the 32bit image.

Pinkypants

TakeThis wrote: »

That's not quite right. The key is the same for either 32bit or 64bit. So if you have a legitimate key, then you need only download the corresponding 32bit image and to burn it to disc. Easily done.

Yeah:T

Laptop has Windows 7 on.

Thank you.

Figment

Pinkypants wrote: »

The windows 7 version I have is 64 bit only

:think: Retail versions of Windows 7 come with both DVDs. This makes me wonder if your generous friend has given you the 64 bit DVD they don't need and kept the 32 bit DVD for them self. One licence key covers one version (32 bit or 64 bit, not both) If the licence key was supplied by the same friend I would suspect it is already being used for their own PC/laptop

tonyh66

im surprised your laptop is not running even slower now, you have changed your OS for a more resource hungry version.....

debitcardmayhem

tonyh66 wrote: »

im surprised your laptop is not running even slower now, you have changed your OS for a more resource hungry version.....

Is W7 more hungry than Vista then ?

tonyh66

debitcardmayhem wrote: »

Is W7 more hungry than Vista then ?

Good question...I thought they were running XP originally :rotfl:

Pinkypants

It's a 64bit OEM version that came with a 64bit machine, but he wanted his old XP hard drive installed on the machine instead, hence a spare Windows operating system.

He has mental health problems and doesn't like change, also plays some very old games on his machine, that I'm not sure would run under Win 7 without a load of hassle.