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Are you capturing and processing on it ?

I gave up with that idea and bought a little netbook with SSD  solely for capturing, mainly for the longer battery life, it runs for 8 hours without charging.

Dave

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For capturing I have a second hand Toughbook that I bought on ebay for £199. Core I5, 4Gb Ram 750Gb hard drive. Military grade hardening, sealed ports, touchpad that can be used with gloves; can be dropped from a height etc.

I have a second PC inside that gets used for everything (once I can get the kids off of it) I7, 16Gb ram, 1TB hard drive etc.

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58 minutes ago, SteveBz said:

Hmm... I just trod on mine last night and broke the screen. SSD and i7 didn't really help protect it.

Just make sure it's relatively solid!

Bummer. I have a 10 year old samsung 17" i5 for outside, i certainly wouldn't dream of taking the Dell out, IMO it's best to have one for outside, one for inside, unless your an armchair Aper.

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7 minutes ago, MARS1960 said:

Bummer. I have a 10 year old samsung 17" i5 for outside, i certainly wouldn't dream of taking the Dell out, IMO it's best to have one for outside, one for inside, unless your an armchair Aper.

The Dell has Gorilla glass screen, have you tried standing on it  :grin:

Dave

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I'm taking photos outside with my lumix G7 and then processing inside. I'm thinking of something capable of running registax, deep sky stacker and rawtherapee or the paid/photoshop equivalent. Is it just a case of get what you can afford and make sure you get as much ram and as a good a processor as possible? I'm not looking to use it for much else really.

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Use an old Toshiba netbook with 250gb HD and just 2 gig ram to run ARTEMIS and PHD2. Running Win7. Clunky but fine for capturing. 

Process on a 2tbHDD 8GB Ram laptop running Win10. Runs ARTEMIS and PHD2 as well as.... 

PIXINSIGHT

SHARPCAP

AUTOSTAKKERT

REGISTAX

PIPP

PHOTOSHOP 

No major problems with any of them

Ideally, if I ever get some space, I'll get a hardy desktop for processing. 

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It is always difficult choosing a laptop for AP, outside use on batteries is totally different to the requirements for image processing especially for a DSLR that may have RAW files greater than 30 Mb per sub. I would opt for a used Panasonic toughbook for outdoors and whatever you can manage spec wise for processing but at least an I5 with SSD, USB 3 ports and Win 10.

Alan

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For imaging I have a Thinkpad X41 laptop and dock running XP.

This is suitable for long exposure DSO work, but I suspect it would struggle with a high-speed planetary camera.

Software is PHD2, Canon Utilities, and Bahtinov Grabber, to drive a LX200 GPS, ZWO 120MM guidecam, and EOS 500D DSLR.

The dock is left cabled up in the warmroom and the laptop comes indoors after use.

For processing I have a W7 64 bit PC and Paintshop Pro X7

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5 hours ago, bottletopburly said:

samsung np3530ec i5 250gb ssd ,1TB hdd,8gb ram ,the main thing i would say is a quad core processor ,6gb ram and definetley a SSD,USB 3ports , if your capturing video ,the ssd makes a massive difference 

 

Why does the ssd make such a big difference with video, bottletopburly???

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If just want something for DSO image capture and autoguiding and you either just want to run it for an hour or two, or you can run it from the mains, then a refurbed/secondhand Windows 7 laptop/netbook should be fine.  You can pick up a Win 7 netbook for as little as £50.

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8 hours ago, Trumpetnut said:

 

Why does the ssd make such a big difference with video, bottletopburly???

 Personally i found  when using ezplanetary it tells you FPS capture rate and HDD read rate, before on my old hdd it would stutter read rate would not be consistent with the capture rate ,since using the SSD this does not happen read rate shows same as capture rate no dropping of frames ,though in firecapture i could only see capture rate could not see what SSD rate was only Ezplanetary seem to have this . Also of note using a SSD, windows does not slow down i have had it installed about a year now and is still as fast now as first install ,no clicking and waiting its click and it opens . 

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