I want a simple laptop to use on my travels for photo editing and keeping in touch.

Budget aroud £500-£550

Running:

PSE8
Canon Software
Photomatix
itunes

Photos are on WD passports

I've found a refurbed Dell Studio 1558 with i3 and 1Gb graphic card and a 15" screen for 510 ish I also found a Sony offer on an E series Vaio for £470 (that said, think seams to send you to a laptop for £650!

I guess I need a separate Graphic Card and as good a processor as I can get. I've tried reading reviews and write ups and they are so contradictory. One review says the Dell studio is fantastic, another says its unreliabel and overheats. Who do I believe?

Where is the oracle of knowledge? What brands do I consider/avoid?

Can't see a great need for an OOT graphics card - they are for movies/motion more than stills.

Regen Technology are pretty good for refurbs if you want to save you pennies for more camera gear. Also Morgan Computers. Regen don't always have really high performance in stock though

Most brandname laptop are ok if treated well, store names laptops can cut corners a bit on physical build and so are easily broken.

I prefer secondhand laptops, if they've been bounced around a bit it means any manufacturing defects have been discovered. Don't forget to budget for a new battery, I've never had a problem with cheap replacement batteries on ebay - I can givve you ebay companies whose batteries I have bought if you need.

Regen Technology CLICKY

Morgan Computers

http://www.aldi.co.uk/uk/html/offers/special_buys3_15063.htm

Get what you like but make sure it's got a guarantee.

Cheers peeps

I had assumed that doing graphic edits would require a good graphic card.....hhhmmm

Good spec on that 1 at aldi

All the hard work is done with the processor and internal memory (or swapping to disk if insufficient memory), even the most basic graphic card is capable of slapping the resultant output on the screen in a split second.

Quality of output (colours, contrast) is very nearly identical for all cards unless you are using very fast raster speeds on a CRT, its the screen that makes the 99.9% of the visual quality.

I guess if you are doing serious quality graphic editing then you will be calibrating the screen, the only thing you can't calibrate out is again very fast raster speeds on CRTs (due to limited frequency bandwidth of the CRT and the D-A converter on the graphics board.

As you are looking at a laptop, you will be stuck with a LCD screen, I would be looking more at the quality of the screen not how "flashy" the graphics processor is.

Many laptops don't have changeable graphics cards in them anyway - this is a big moan from the Gaming community where they want high speed animation by having the latest graphics processor with loads of hardware acceleration.

I can't comment on quality of LCD displays, IMHO they are all rubbish compared to a good quality CRT.

I don't know how purist you are, but normally your eyes and brain adapts to whatever you use, as long as the resolution is high enough for the detail you want, I would not particularly worry about the screen either - just main processor power with quite a bit of memory so changes you make happen quicker. I was waiting 50 seconds a time yesterday with some image processing I was doing on my old dilapidated laptop.

Lecture over

Heres a good laptop

Osborne 1 - good computer, played with these - CP/M operating system.

You should get plenty for £550. Try http://www.computerplus.uk.com/ In Liverpool.