Tired of slow laptops - Need one for basic Gopro/drone video editing

[doolin64]

1. What is your budget? $1500 max. Prefer to be around $1000.

2. What is the size of the notebook that you are considering? I'm a fan of notebooks that have a number pad attached to the keyboard. Portability is not hugely important. Really will only be used in my house.

3. What screen resolution do you want? You tell me what I need!

4. Do you need a portable or desktop replacement laptop? This is more or less a desktop replacement.

5. How much battery life do you need? 3 or 4 hours?

6. Do you want to play games with your laptop? If so then please list the games that you want to with the settings that you want for these games. (Low,Medium or High)? I'm not into gaming at all.

7. What other tasks do you want to do with your laptop? (Photo/Video editing, Etc.) I will use this laptop for basic functions. Paying bills, surfing the web, email, managing real estate photos and personal ones. The biggest issue...I want to take my gopro videos and now my drone videos and edit them. This is not professional movie stuff. Videos of my children playing, riding swimming. Videos of me dirtbiking, fourwheeling etc. I just want a laptop I can chop up the videos, add music, etc.

8. How much storage (Hard Drive capacity) do you need? I believe an SSD hard drive is what I need. I guess as big as I can get for the budget? 256 minimum? I have a new external western digital 2 TB hard drive for backup.

9. If you are considering specific sites to buy from, please post their links. I'm open to purchasing from any reputable seller.

10. How long do you want to keep your laptop? 4 to 5 years. I still have an 8 year old HP that is cranking along on WIndows Vista and worlds faster than a junky Toshiba windows 10 unit I bought 2 years ago. It's so damn slow. I barely have anything saved to it.

11. What kind of Optical drive do you need? DVD ROM/Writer,Bluray ROM/Writer,Etc ? I have an external DVD writer I could use if needed. I bought to use with my Toshiba.

12. Please tell us about the brands that you prefer to buy from them and the brands that you don't like and explain the reasons. I have no preference to brands. Due to the learning curve and price, I'd prefer to stay away from Apple.

13. What country do you live in? USA

14. Please tell us any additional information if needed. I think we covered everything.

 

[Geekwad]

Have you thought about putting an SSD in the Toshiba and doing a clean, fresh install of Win10 on it to see if it improves things (as I'm sure it would)?

If it still has all the factory bloat-ware on it from Toshiba, and was a Win10 upgrade from Win7......this will likely make a substantial improvement to performance.

 

[doolin64]

This laptop was purchased with Win 7 and was upgraded to Win 10 within a week of owning it. I wouldn't be opposed to doing this. I will post up the machines specs when I get home to see if it will be sufficient to go this route (harddrive upgrade and clean window's 10 install)

 

[captaincharisma]

i agree. if you don't care about any of the software that came with the Toshiba laptop i would backup any important files and load a copy of windows 10 on a USB drive and do a clean install

 

[doolin64]

Here are the specs for my machine:

Toshiba P55W B5224
1TB HD of which only (152 gb used)
8 GB Ram
i7 -4510u 2.6 GHZ processor.

Can I add more ram to this machine? Where is a good place to purchase? If I go to an SSD drive, what brand/where should I look for that?

Or am I better off to just get a new machine...still wipe this out and reinstall windows and keep this is as a back up machine. To do this, I'll need a buy a copy of Win 10 correct?

 

[captaincharisma]

from looking up you model on the Toshiba website it says in the specs the ram is not user upgradable. but that just may mean that they don't have an easy access slot to get to the memory modules:


http/support.toshiba.com/support/staticContentDetail?contentId=4006050&isFromTOCLink=false

 

[doolin64]

THat's what I was seeing but I found a few videos that show how to remove the back of the laptop to install. I think that's more the issue, access is just not easy.

 

[Geekwad]

Here are the specs for my machine:

Toshiba P55W B5224
1TB HD of which only (152 gb used)
8 GB Ram
i7 -4510u 2.6 GHZ processor.

Can I add more ram to this machine? Where is a good place to purchase? If I go to an SSD drive, what brand/where should I look for that?

Or am I better off to just get a new machine...still wipe this out and reinstall windows and keep this is as a back up machine. To do this, I'll need a buy a copy of Win 10 correct?

You could buy more RAM, but I wouldn't make it a priority. 8gb is acceptable for an average user, but of course 16 is better (just not noticeably better with the other specs in the system).

EDIT: If you do go with 16gb of RAM, do make sure you buy a matched 16gb kit and not just add 8gb to what you have (if that's possible). Unmatched RAM kits will produce insidious problems, and thus possibly very frustrating.

The hard drive is a real bottleneck though. It's a 5400rpm drive, so a SSD would be night and day different (and once the page file is on a SSD vs. very slow HDD.....the RAM amount will be less meaningful).

A 250-500gb SSD and a clean install will make a world of difference here. For Win 10, if you have the Win7 key for it you should be able to install Win10 directly and then call Microsoft to activate it....which is part of the activation process when you put in a Win7-8 key in. Drive swaps allow you keep the same OS copy, so they will just give you a new key to complete the activation process.

 

[doolin64]

Thank you Geekwad.

I'm going to weigh the difference between adding more RAM and an SSD versus a laptop upgrade.

Going back to my original question...does anyone have any suggestions?

 

[Geekwad]

Going back to my original question...does anyone have any suggestions?

Even though you're not going to be using it for gaming, I would highly recommend a starter 'gaming' laptop just so you have a entry-level dedicated GPU in the machine.

https/www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834332754

The GPU can also be helpful for certain editing tasks, hardware acceleration, etc.

I find laptop with a small dGPU to have much more longevity than ones without. My 2675mq is from 2011, and because it has a 512mb dGPU.....I have absolutely no reason to upgrade it. It performs just as well for what I use it for (with an SSD) as it did the day I purchased it.