Please help with purchasing a new laptop. I need speed.

[LindaWW]

I'm tired of having a laptop that can't keep up with me.

I live online, and have worked in and around the Internet industry for almost twenty years. I'm also ADD so its not unusual for me to have 10-20 browser tabs open in Chrome. Sometimes I also have Firefox open as well as I feel they have different strengths.

Other applications I use daily are: Outlook, Photoshop, FTP, Microsoft Access and Excel, as well as tons of utilities such as backup, remote access, soluto, various cloud drives, and productivity tools. Right now my computer takes 4-5 minutes to boot.

My biggest frustration is that dreaded mouse cursor circle that goes round and round making me wait. Chrome or Outlook often say 'not responding', but if I wait they come back. Here is my current configuration.

Asus N70SV, Intel Core2 Duo CPU P8700 @ 2.53GHz, 4 GB DDR2 SDRAM, NVIDIA GeForce GT 130M. 300 GB Hard Drive.

I have the hard drive partitioned to have Programs & OS on C (82GB used), and Files on D (68GB used).

This will be for work and I'm a part owner, so I want to make a case for the laptop I need but don't want to purchase more than I need. I thought 2 drives, one 128 GB SSD the other SATA 500GB but I can't find that. Portability is not that important so I don't need a super light ultrabook, but a mobile laptop is still required.

How much RAM, which processor, buy now or wait a bit? If you hardware guys could provide some help or insight, this software girl would be very grateful.

Thanks,

Linda WW

 

[kenrivers]

Are you comfortable changing the drives in a laptop? I only ask because if you can find the dual drive laptop you would like you could buy one that has two drive bays (one occupied and one that is empty). You could then purchase an SSD and add it as the OS drive and move the installed drive to the second bay for storage. This would involve cloning or imaging the original drive so that the preinstalled OS is "copied" to the new drive.
Of course you could also look here: http://www.sagernotebook.com/index.php?page=products
You can customize the laptop to include a SSD as the OS drive and add a second HDD for storage.
You can use this as an example: http://www.sagernotebook.com/index.php?page=product_customed&model_name=NP6370

 

[LindaWW]

Ken,
Thanks for your response. I like your suggestion. While I haven't done it before I understand what you are saying and could probably do it after a little Internet research.

I also like the idea of a Sager notebook, the total customization is really tempting. However, I'm in Canada so I will probably stick with a brand that I can get repaired locally as I couldn't be without my laptop for the time it would take to ship it somewhere and then wait to get it back. Luckily I'm not that far from Toronto, so almost every major manufacturer is available within 100km.

Do you have any recommendations for RAM or processor? Should I consider the i7 or would the i5 be enough? What about RAM? 6GB, 8GB, or more?

I don't want to buy more than I need but at the same time I don't want to be wishing that I spent an extra $100 on RAM sixths months after buying the thing.

Thanks again.

 

[kenrivers]

Part of the answer depends on what you do now and what you think you might like to do in the future. 16GB of RAM should be plenty and 8GB should be the minimum you go with. The extra RAM will help with the open browser windows and will definitely help with Photoshop as well as multitasking. You will appreciate the speed of an SSD boot drive. Photoshop should be fine with an i5 but if you can spring for it an i7 might be a good choice depending on what you think you might be doing later. Please let me know if have any other questions.