I work solely Desktops and mostly PC with Pshop Cs3 and View Nx. Gimp and Corel Photo paint are hidden in my system as is every version of photoshop going back to 5...

The best laptop is a Macbook pro hands down...

I have a 15 inch Apple Macbook Pro which does a great job. I have tons of different editing software but the ones I use the most are adobe light room for organizing and Adobe Photoshop CS4 for editing. Photoshop is pricey so you can alway look at The Gimp. It's a free "Photoshop like" application. Good Luck

Thanks for the clarification on laptops warprints. I was considering one because my wife gets lonely when I have my back to her all evening so with a laptop at least I would be able to sit beside her and still play with pics/net etc.

I am seeing decent-ish laptops starting at £500 and going to £800 though so she is going to have to stay lonely!

Sounds like building your own PC is out of the question for you lemongrass. It'll give you more problems and frustrations so I don't recommend it for YOU.

UPS, no not the big brown truck that delivers your packages, stands for Uninterruptible Power Source. It's a big battery looking device that is normally plugged into a regular wall socket so you don't have to worry about keeping it charged. You then plug all of your electrical equipment into it instead of the wall socket.

If the power to your house or office is cut or "freaks out" then the UPS kicks in and powers your stuff. It's not a generator so it won't power your computer for more than a few minutes. It just gives you time to save your work and properly shut down your computer.

Thanks for those replied, and NikoDolby for the sincerity of providing the info and managing the threads.

Now, I'm not sure about the idea of building a pc. It sounds kind of sophisticated. How many components do you need? RAM cards, graphic + sound card, cpu, harddrive, motherboard, grandmotherboard, wires, tapes, glues, scissors, Legos? I'll probably look into a book of Computer Engineering for Dummies (1st edition).

Radeon hd 5000 overkills (this word is so popular, everyone is using it now even at the place i work)? It's pricy too that I can get a drobo. gtx 200s or even the hd 4000s will suffice? (for games like Need for Speed/Crisis/Assassins Creed FULL EFFECT TURNED ON)

I can't seem to find ups. What is it and where to get? Buying a ssd is still too early. Even at a larger capacity, it depreciates faster. I heard some hdd lasts for at least 10 years, maybe there're ways to prevent dead hdds?

Smaller size led better than large size lcd?

Wait till you have 3 screens.. then you cant go back to one ! LOL

I was using a Dell 17" laptop with 2TB of external HDD hooked up to it, doing all my editing and whatnot on that. I thought that was big until I upgraded and bought a desktop with a 27" monitor :D

At first I thought 27" was overkill, but now I can't use anything smaller lol.

At first a laptop seems ok until you start working with a desktop and big screen with the extra power behind it.

usually when You calm down the temperature the drive starts to work normally, but if You are using Your computer than You should notice when the temperature is getting to high - rule of thumb, if You can't touch it with bare hand it means that something is wrong - see a specialist

What about over heating? Hard drives hate heat.

foofie - just get a UPS, as it looks like You might have some problems with electricity - I'm in IT business for many years, and never had so many HDD crashes like You; moreover, most system failures were caused by electricity problems

yeah with the costs of SSD's, I'd rather just buy a first gen (4 bay) drobo. It'll be nice one day when ssd's come down in price though.

The problem with SSD drives is that they don't hold much. They are good for temp storage like on a laptop but forget about it if you shoot several gb worth of pictures. More megapixels equals more storage needs. Throw HD video into it the mix and you can forget about SSD drives as your main storage.

If your having so many hard drive crashes, try a SSD hard drive. They are uber expensive, but worth the price if you want/need stability.

QuadraPixel said:
Don't buy a PC, build your own, saves a ton of cash. If you like games, at least get a Radeon 5830 video card, they are a real powerhouse for the price. You can get a good 23" lcd for about $200 now-a-days.

External HDD's, just get the one that cheapest per GB with out going to cheep.

I'll concur with the above, except the hard drive part. Between my dad and I we have had way too many external hardrives crash over the years, I think we've gone through about 10 or 11 total. These hard drives just sit on his desk, never really get moved. So yeah brand definitely matters. what brand? I wish I knew :P

If you can afford it a drobo seems like it would be a pretty fantastic option, and I think they are pretty unbeatable when it comes to that kind of set up, but it might be overkill for what you want, I don't know.

And I game as well, as a desktop is always better than a laptop, except one area and that is that you can't game with your desktop in bed. However I would still highly recommend going the desktop route. For the same amount of money (especially if you build your own, or even if you aren't comfortable building your own, buy the parts yourself and have someone else build it, which can be done semi-cheaply) you can get a much much better system.

Lemongrass started this topic in another thread. I'm moving it here to keep computer related "talk" to a few threads only. This is after all a photography forum.

lemongrass said:
Hey guys,

I'm planning to buy a new pc. Just a few questions I'm wondering:

1) Which video card (N, A or others) do you guys use for graphic editing and entertainment?

2) For gaming, besides the screen size, is there any difference between using a laptop and a desktop computer?

3) Which brand of external hard drive is the best? Just having it sit at home all day so portability is not an issue here but reliability and durability is (as I've already had a lot of dead ones in the past).

Thanks for any suggestion, I appreciate it!

1. I think video card memory and RAM are more important than brand. Though I've never had problems with my ATI or GeForce cards. My smallest has 1gb of memory. I think, it's been awhile since I've upgraded graphic cards.

2. For gaming refresh times are more important. The cheaper laptops have slow screens compared to a desktop. You can buy a faster and bigger screen for a desktop. I hate playing games on laptops. Unless it's hooked up to a big screen.

Laptops also get hot really really fast when you are playing extensive games for a long time.

And again you can stuff waay more RAM into a desktop than a laptop. Especially afterwards in a future upgrade.

3. I've used them all and they all have the potential to fail regardless of brand!

See these threads on hard drive back up and processors.

Discussions on hard drives
http://nikonrumors.com/forum/topic.php?id=410#post-5258
http://nikonrumors.com/forum/topic.php?id=952

Drobo NAS Review
http://nikonrumors.com/forum/topic.php?id=955

Best processor
http://nikonrumors.com/forum/topic.php?id=994

swame_sp said:
I heard Apple support for their laptops are so good. That's why thinking on that route.

I've got horror stories from both so don't think that Apple is any better just because they are Apple.

adamz said:
niko - how did You get to use ipad for two months, it's not even a month on the market.

OK so it's been more like a month and a half but shhh... don't tell anyone! :^)

Well having used both laptop and desktop I think sometime having the laptop is a bonus as well. in few occasions i edited two music videos in my laptop because i was on the go most of the time so for me it was more convinced to work on the laptop.

so if you can afford to have them both you will be more flexible in terms of finishing you're projects.

I use both laptop and desktop.
Laptop - Apple MBP 15.4, 2.4Ghz, 4Gb Ram + 500GB/7200rpm hdd - no problems with editing even a larger number of RAW files
Desktop - Apple Mac Mini - 2.0 Ghz, 4Gb Ram + 500GB/7200rpm hdd + MiniMax 1TB drive + some other drives for storage :D + Dell 2408WFP screen - also no problems at all with this setup.
as for windows... well, I was using them since windows 3.1 and stopped at XP, after that I've switched to mac os x and never regret this decision after that.
anyway, no matter what You gonna get - You need a lot of RAM and You need a lot of HDD (either ssd or at least 7200rpm), cpu speed dosn't matter that much, neither graphic card. If You can afford 2 screens, it helps a lot - get the best possible You can, 24inch is a minimum for me for photos editing when not in go.

niko - how did You get to use ipad for two months, it's not even a month on the market. agree with You, that it's an amazing tool for displaying images to Your customers/family/etc..

Yeah true, depends on my choice. I'm a PC person since my college days.

Of late, I'm hearing that Macs are used by professionals for their editing.

I'll have to buy a laptop sometime soon for my personal use. I'm leaning towards MBP as my previous two instances with PC has miserably failed resulting in financial loss. I heard Apple support for their laptops are so good. That's why thinking on that route.

I don't like to do heavy edits on my photographs but will do the basic adjustments for the photo, only if required.

Yeah I agree warprints. For the money you get a lot more out of a desktop (PC) than a laptop. I do all of my photo editing on both Mac and PC desktops. Though mostly on PC desktop just because it facilitates exchanging files with 90% of the worlds computers. The laptops are mainly for travel, internet, email, and goofing off on Nikon Rumors Forum :^)

spraynpray said:
Why the statement about not using a laptop warprints? Given a similar spec, is there a difference?

No, I did not mean to say not to use a laptop. Given similar spec, the software should preform similarly. However...., you're talking a pretty expensive laptop to get similar spec. Dedicated 1GB graphics card, several GB RAM, etc., then, not to mention the screen issues. I don't know about lately, but not too long ago, you really couldn't get a laptop (PC, anyway) with a screen good enough to really accurately reproduce the image. Of course, you could hook up the high powered laptop to a monitor, etc.

My comment about using the laptop really was addressing my personal situation, in which my tower (which I also use for gaming) is much more powerful than my laptop, so the tower is what I generally use.

Hey swame_sp. Welcome to the forum.

This forum is heavily biased towards Apple so I'm sure you'll get a bunch of votes for a Mac. There are also a lot of "hackers" here who like Linux too. I personally don't use a laptop for photo editing mainly because of the small screen. I prefer editing my pictures at max res (or as close to it) on a big screen. I actually work on dual screens most of the time.

Unless you are very into computers and software I wouldn't recommend a Linux.I have use both PCs and Macs and honestly they both have their pluses and minuses. I hate the high price of Macs and often times I feel like I'm only paying for the Apple name. I mostly use my Macbook for showing off my portfolio but recently I've been using an ipad for about two months now and it's OK to show off your photos but definitely not useful for photo editing.

PCs are pretty cheap and software is easier, and also cheaper, to come by. I haven't had any problems with my PC desktops (HPs). I have had problems with a few Dell laptops (dead power adapters, broken keyboard keys) but I've had more problems with my Macs (motherboard, internal battery, graphic card, monitor). Unless you are very into computers and software I wouldn't recommend a Linux.

So it really depends on YOU what YOU like. I suggest you go and try both PCs and Macs out. They are both very capable for photo editing although PCs give you a lot more for your money then a Mac does.

Why the statement about not using a laptop warprints? Given a similar spec, is there a difference?

I was just thinking of getting one myself is why I'm asking...

Well, I usually do not use a laptop to seriously edit, but in a pinch I will use lightroom 3 Beta, NX2 or elements which are on my Vista OS laptop. Most editing is done on a tower running XP Pro using NX2 or Lightroom 2.

Hello,

I'm on the verge of buying my first DSLR (D90). Additionally I would like to know which laptop (exactly the OS, Win/Linux/Mac) do you use for the editing and mainly the software used for it.

Thanks and Regards