Image processing laptop spec?

[Helen]

I'm considering getting a new laptop which I'd like to use for image processing (I love my netbook for capture, but its rather slow for stacking etc). I've got to the analysis paralysis stage with looking at websites. So, what spec processor etc should I be looking for? I don't want a big or too heavy one, and long battery life would be good. Oh, and not too expensive. Are these mutually exclusive

Thanks

Helen

[Photosbykev]

i7 core with 4Gb of ram and a good hard disk size is probably a good spec without going totally overboard but the higher the processor speed etc the more power it uses and the battery life will drop.

[glennbech]

The processing power requirement really depends on

1) How large images you will be working on

2) Your patience

My main camera is 6.3 Megapixels. Each RAW frame is about 6Megabyte. I sometimes use 2x Drizzle and end up with 200MB TIFS that is about 6000x3000 pixels in size.

At the moment I do most processing on a 1.86GHz. Core 2 Duo w/2 GB of RAM. I suspect this setup is more than adequate for most image sizes in the same range (up to 10-12 Megapixels).

Image manipulation in Photoshop works very well and stacking 30-40 images take a while :-) I wouldn't worry too much about stacking time. You can watch a TV show or something while the stacking is done.

One thing you should consider, is a SSD disk. (Solid State Drive). They are 10x faster than normal harddrives and will speed up stacking and loading of images into photoshop.

If you have a full 35mm sized camera chip (from a Canon 5D or similar), you have 20MB Raw files. Then I would not recommend a laptop at all.

[Photosbykev]

A laptop and the 5D MkII camera don't make the best of bed fellows lol The last star trail sequence I shot was over 2000 full frame raw files, when converted to tiffs there was over 250Gb of images that needed processing! Even with a pair of 200Gb SSDs and 24Gb of ram my pc took a while to plough through them.

[Helen]

Thanks guys. I've got a QHY8 CCD, so reasonable but not huge files for DSO work. I do however do a lot of solar work, andthe AVIs for these get very big very quickly! I thought my netbook didn't do too badly, until I went to the imaging day and compared the speed of a normal laptop.

The other challenge is going to be getting either one with XP installed, or getting XP on it. Does the Windows 7 XP mode work well?

Thanks

Helen

[Photosbykev]

Thanks guys. I've got a QHY8 CCD, so reasonable but not huge files for DSO work. I do however do a lot of solar work, andthe AVIs for these get very big very quickly! I thought my netbook didn't do too badly, until I went to the imaging day and compared the speed of a normal laptop.

The other challenge is going to be getting either one with XP installed, or getting XP on it. Does the Windows 7 XP mode work well?

Thanks

Helen

It might be worth considering buying a second hard drive that fits the new laptop and do a fresh install of XP on it. That would give you a hot spare drive that could also be reformatted later on.

[Dai150PL]

I hope you don't mind, I recommend this, and for less than £30 you can have it running XP Pro better than a pc can. MacBook - Apple Store (UK)

[Helen]

Thanks guys. I've been to town this afternoon, and am now typing this on my new Toshiba i7 laptop I did seriously consider a mac, but the difference in cost was just too much to justify.

I now need to work out how to get it running XP. Is it easy to set it up for double boot - I've got XP disks.

Thanks

Helen