Need help choosing a laptop

Francesco Tamburi

Estimable
Oct 17, 2014
5
0
4,510
My sister's birthday is coming up and me and my mother wanted to buy her a laptop, so we went looking for computers at a local electronics store. We managed to narrow our choice down to 4 choices:

Acer Aspire E5-721
Lenovo G5070 (with the i3)
HP-rn006nl
Asus F550

My sister goes to an art school so she'll be needing something that can handle programs like photoshop smoothly enough, but aside from that she just needs something normal with a battery that lasts a decent amount and the capacity to play hd video. An optical disk drive is a plus but not a must.
 
Solution
You are going to have a hard time doing Adobe products on a $400 lappie. The requirements on the adobe site are ridiculously low.

From a cash standpoint, the Apple MacBook Pros excel here, especially as they include large student discounts. They are also quite durable....

http://store.apple.com/us-hed/browse/campaigns/education_pricing


On the windows platform, I think you need to be in the $850 category.... something like this perhaps w/ a upgrade to 16GB to get thru the 4 years

http://www.lpc-digital.com/sager-np4658.html

JobCreator

Honorable
Apr 18, 2013
62
0
10,610
If you want to run photoshop with any sort of efficiency, you're going to want a much better laptop than what you have selected there.

http://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/system-requirements.html

Adobe recommends 8GB of RAM.

This is not to say those laptops there won't run the program, but it's going to be more frustrating than productive. I would try to increase your price point if you want to really hit the nail on the head.
 
You are going to have a hard time doing Adobe products on a $400 lappie. The requirements on the adobe site are ridiculously low.

From a cash standpoint, the Apple MacBook Pros excel here, especially as they include large student discounts. They are also quite durable....

http://store.apple.com/us-hed/browse/campaigns/education_pricing


On the windows platform, I think you need to be in the $850 category.... something like this perhaps w/ a upgrade to 16GB to get thru the 4 years

http://www.lpc-digital.com/sager-np4658.html
 
Solution

Francesco Tamburi

Estimable
Oct 17, 2014
5
0
4,510
Increasing the price point isn't exactly an option for us, unfortunately, could I maybe work around it by buying and installing additional RAM or would it be cheaper to buy a better computer? Even if it doesn't run the latest version of photoshop as smoothly as it could, maybe installing an older version or another problem could be an idea.
 

Francesco Tamburi

Estimable
Oct 17, 2014
5
0
4,510


It'd be nice if we could afford it, but unfortunately we have a 400 - 450 (really pushing it) euro budget. She's not going to necessarily be using photoshop, her teacher hasn't yet decided what program to use and I said photoshop for lack of knowledge on other image editing/graphics design programs.

Macs aren't an option since student discounts aren't offered in Italy and even if they were, I doubt they could bring a macbook pro into our price level.
 
The main problem with most of these laptops is the cpu and the ram. If you are going to do basic image editing then 4 gigs should be ok provided there is a good gpu. You could look at hp laptops with a quadrino series gpus as they are made for this tasks. Otherwise you could try the hp in the list and upgrade the ram but again the cpu may struggle as it is a ulv and not a m cpu.
 

Francesco Tamburi

Estimable
Oct 17, 2014
5
0
4,510


Ok, so a dedicated gpu is better. That leaves the HP and Lenovo (I noticed I linked the g50 instead of the g5070 that we saw). At that point I think the Lenovo's better since the gpu has 2gb ram and it has a Haswell i3 vs the HP's Sandy Bridge though I could be wrong, especially on the gpu part that I know little about.

G5070 (4gb ram, AMD Radeon R5 M230 2GB, i3 cpu and 500 GB HDD
 


The gpu in the hp is better than the one you linked. This will make it easier to run photoshop. I am assuming that your sister is not going to do heavy video editing as the i3 is not very strong as it is an ulv chip. If this is the case, I would really recommend a laptop with an i5 m cpu and 8 gigs of ram as a minimum.