The biggest drawback with laptops is the maximum memory configuration; apart from that they are more than good enough for most purposes.
My work machine (a Compaq 8710w) supposedly can support 4GB memory sticks, so in theory can support 8GB of memory. But 4GB memory sticks are hard to find (and 32-bit Windows won't address more than 3GB anyway), so typical notebooks (2 DIMM slots) can often have a limit of 4GB physical RAM. You should be able to find a Core 2 Duo processor (speed 2.2 - 2.5 GHz) and a dedicated graphics card (ATI or nVidia) and 500GB of had disk space at a reasonable price; we paid roughly $700 for an HP with a 17" display six months ago, and prices generally go down (just like camera bodies). [We actually paid a little more than that, but that was to get a second hard drive and Windows 7 64-bit Professional] The newer processors (i5, etc.) are even faster, but (of course) more expensive. I haven't found LR to be sluggish on my systems. But the memory size can be an issue, especially working with very large images such as stitched panoramas; the I/O bandwidth from notebook drives is not as good as you can get from a SCSI RAID array. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
