Laptop spec

Hi, as mentioned in previous threads I am new to the world of digital photography. I have been using my existing laptop but to be honest it is rather elderly and rather slow and is just not up to the job. Please could someone advise me on what kind of memory etc I should be looking at if I were to purchase a new one. There seems to be an awful lot of upgrading that I need to do (camera body, lenses, laptop) and I am just trying to get my head around what I need. Basically I would like to be able to run the full version of Photoshop on it, have space to process RAW images and also internet connection.

As always, any help is much appreciated.

Many thanks

What camera do you have, and if you're planning to upgrade soon, what is the camera you're considering? Do you do a lot of batch processing? How many images do you process on an average day? Any special manipulations that you need, such as photostitching?

Hi there, at the moment I have got a 350D but I am planning to upgrade to either a 40D or 500D (secondhand to save some money as I do not have much of a budget right now). I will not be processing daily or anything like, but when I do (if I have been to an airshow for example) we could be talking about anything up to maybe 800 shots in a go. I am wanting to convert to shooting in RAW as I have been using JPEG up until now but want the flexibility that I believe RAW will give me when it comes to PP in Photoshop. My current laptop is rather elderly and only has a small memory (hhmm sounds a bit like me come to think of it!!) and is just so slow to do anything so an upgrade is definately on the cards and I do not want to make a mistake in what I buy.

Many thanks for the reply

Sorry Tony, forgot to say that at the moment I wont be doing any photostitching or anything like that but in the future - who knows!!

I think any i-series laptop with dual-core and hyper threading and a 512 mb recent video card would do fine. I'm still using my MacBook Pro (2.4 ghz Core 2 Duo, 8600/256 mb video) with Aperture and Photoshop and it does fine for processing 5Dii raw files. I suggest you identify your software needs, then select a computer to fit the requirements.

Macbook Pro.