laptop question

[cjdawson]

57 minutes ago, geordie85 said:

I really wish this had been posted yesterday. I just bought an Alienware M17x r2 , Full HD, 8core I7 , 16 Gb DDR 3 , 1TB HDD, AMD HD5870

I guess it's going to be over kill but I really like the look of them and it should be very future proof.

Right, what you have there is a fantastic machine that will do "everything" you could possibly want.

It'll be great for doing the image processing on as well.  Should set you up nicely for the next decade

 

[geordie85]

31 minutes ago, cjdawson said:

Right, what you have there is a fantastic machine that will do "everything" you could possibly want.

It'll be great for doing the image processing on as well.  Should set you up nicely for the next decade

 

Thanks, I hope so. At the moment it takes me over an hour and a half to stack 161 subs in AstroArt 6 and that's without any calibration frames.

[Alien 13]

54 minutes ago, Buzzard75 said:

I have a Microsoft Surface Pro 4 with an i7, 8GB RAM, and a 256GB SSD with another 256GB microSD card. I use it for both data acquisition and processing. Gathering data is no problem at all. Note that it only has one USB plug though. Right now I'm not using it to run a mount or a guide camera, just capture images from a single camera so one is all I need. It's a little slow at processing the data (stacking, editing, etc.), but it's not painfully slow. I'm sure a higher end laptop with a faster processor and more RAM would chew through it quicker, but it does the job. Best of all it's light weight and extremely portable. The surface pros aren't cheap for what they are, but I really like mine and use it for everything. Well worth the money spent.

The Surface Pro are nice, my laptop is very heavy having a metal chassis so borderline for travel but the battery life is surprisingly good.

Alan

[cjdawson]

1 hour ago, geordie85 said:

Thanks, I hope so. At the moment it takes me over an hour and a half to stack 161 subs in AstroArt 6 and that's without any calibration frames.

I don't have AstroArt, I use DSS instead.  That said, when I'm stacking I'll prefer to use my Desktop instead of my laptop - (I7 32Gb ram V I5 8Gb ram)  The new version of DSS I think can use multiple cores so should fly now.  

[geordie85]

1 hour ago, cjdawson said:

I don't have AstroArt, I use DSS instead.  That said, when I'm stacking I'll prefer to use my Desktop instead of my laptop - (I7 32Gb ram V I5 8Gb ram)  The new version of DSS I think can use multiple cores so should fly now.  

AstroArt 6 is much faster than DSS. 8f I used DSS it would be atleast double that time, maybe even longer 

[cjdawson]

Was that DSS 3, or 4?    If I understand things right, DSS4 has had a radical redesign inside and runs much much faster than DSS3 did.

[geordie85]

1 hour ago, cjdawson said:

Was that DSS 3, or 4?    If I understand things right, DSS4 has had a radical redesign inside and runs much much faster than DSS3 did.

It was DSS 3.3.4 I think. I never downloaded the newest version as I bought AstroArt 6 

[cjdawson]

1 minute ago, geordie85 said:

It was DSS 3.3.4 I think. I never downloaded the newest version as I bought AstroArt 6 

That'll be why, it used only a single processor core.  The newer version uses multi-core