Using Photoshop Elements on a laptop

My question is kind of related to this forum topic so I hope there isn't a problem with asking it here as I didn't know where else to ask it.
I plan on taking a Photoshop course in the new year so, I'll be buying a laptop to take to where the course will be held.
I currently don't own a laptop so, any recommendations as to minimum processor power and ram memory I should be looking for in a laptop to run Elements 6?

Due to cost, I'm ruling out Mac Books and any laptop with a i7 processor as any of the ones I've seen so far, are over $1000 CDN.
I don't want to spend that much money on the laptop as it will not be my main computer for doing any post processing after taking the course.
I orignally was looking at laptops with the i3 processor but was told that wouldn't be enough to run Elements smoothly.
I have no idea if that is true or not.
I had assumed that any new laptop these days would be powerfull enough to run a program like Elements.

My daughter has gotten a lot of use of Elements 4 and 5 on various inexpensive/low-powered laptops, although I really haven't taken the time to look at performance issues.

But on newer laptops, and using Elements 6, I really figure you should do fine. You could boost the RAM, which could help with any newer digicam and their large MPs. With at least 2GB (or more) of RAM I'd think a laptop in the $500 range should do fine.

I spent quite a bit of time using Elements 5 on my old Core-Duo laptop with 2 GB of RAM without any trouble. It was a bit slow to load, but once loaded seemed to work fine. When I bought Elements 9 for my desktop I transferred my Elements 7 installation to the laptop. Although I seldom use it now, it seems to work just fine.

Just for information, the Core-Duo is the 32-bit processor that preceded the 64-bit Core2-Duo, which came before the Core-i# series, so it is quite ancient.

tonylong wrote in post #13340021
My daughter has gotten a lot of use of Elements 4 and 5 on various inexpensive/low-powered laptops, although I really haven't taken the time to look at performance issues.

But on newer laptops, and using Elements 6, I really figure you should do fine. You could boost the RAM, which could help with any newer digicam and their large MPs. With at least 2GB (or more) of RAM I'd think a laptop in the $500 range should do fine.

I think you are right about RAM being the key factor.
I was just at a site where someone had said that Elements doesn't use a lot of a computers processing power, it's mainly the RAM that's used.
Knowing this, will be a help in deciding on a laptop.
Thanks

Rimmer wrote in post #13340150
I spent quite a bit of time using Elements 5 on my old Core-Duo laptop with 2 GB of RAM without any trouble. It was a bit slow to load, but once loaded seemed to work fine. When I bought Elements 9 for my desktop I transferred my Elements 7 installation to the laptop. Although I seldom use it now, it seems to work just fine.

Just for information, the Core-Duo is the 32-bit processor that preceded the 64-bit Core2-Duo, which came before the Core-i# series, so it is quite ancient.

Thanks for the information and reply.

I suspect you'll need to upgrade Elements due to the different operating systems. I think Elements 7 was the first version that would work with Visat 64 for me. I now have an i5 powered laptop with 4g of RAM and Win 7. I still have Elements 9 on it, but now use it for CS5 instead and it meets my needs.

scotthidley wrote in post #13346381
I suspect you'll need to upgrade Elements due to the different operating systems. I think Elements 7 was the first version that would work with Visat 64 for me. I now have an i5 powered laptop with 4g of RAM and Win 7. I still have Elements 9 on it, but now use it for CS5 instead and it meets my needs.

I did a search about compatibility issues and it turns out that some people have had problems with Elements 6 and Windows 7 while others haven't.
Thanks for the tip regarding potential upgrades required.