Advice On Buying New PC/Laptop For Design!!!

Lukas

New Member
Hey all, my first post here so hi! :up:

I've been designing on and off for a few years now and want to try to make some money out of it now.

I'm in a position financially to buy some new hardware in order to do this reasonably well. At the moment I do all of my work in the Adobe Creative Suite CS5 but my system is dying a long slow death...

I've had my Toshiba Satellite A200-1VG for about 4 years now and although I initially got it to do a bit of webdesign and other admin bits and bobs and it has served me well up until recently, it isn't a good enough machine to do what I want it to do. It has 2GB RAM, 150 GB HDD, Intel Core 2 Duo CPU and 1.50GHz in it with a 1280 x 800 display and amazingly enough an Intel 965 Express graphics card... awful I know, but it's done ok so far... until it began to slow down.

SO, the time has come to buy a new laptop/desktop BUT I have a budget and don't want to spend more than I have to if I can help it. I don't really game on my PC so that's not important (though I may have the odd game of Age of Empires on it now and again), I do need a decent DVD drive for burning movies and backups as well as client files and images etc. Not worried about size, weight, speakers etc as it will be staying in my office. I know I need a dedicated graphics card and I know I want at least 4GB RAM and 500GB HDD. I also want a large screen so have been looking at 17.3" models so far.

I have been taken by the price and specs of the following laptops:

Samsung R780
Samsung RC710
Acer Aspire 7741G
Acer Aspire 7551G

And I wondered if anyone had any feedback on them, or their specs at all to help me out. I am getting SO confused!

Also, to add fuel to the fire, my Dad has offered to give me his old desktop, now it's a decent enough PC, but I know with that I can upgrade the memory and graphics etc and buy a 19" monitor for about £70, so would it be better and cheaper to do that instead of forking out £550+ for a decent desktop replacement laptop???

Soooooo confusing....

Would REALLY appreciate ANY input anyone could give me on this one... I need to decide soon, the money I have set aside for this project is going to disappear soon if I'm not careful lol!!!

Thanks a million - once I've had some help and decided I'm sure I'll be back with more questions lol!
 
what applications are you definitely using and to what extent?

do you do graphic work, websites, what? and to what extent?


nowadays you'll find most PCs or Macs have i5/i7 processors with 2GB RAM+, but depending on what work your doing you may need a spec that matches that or is more powerful than that.

if you provide more information, i'm sure we could advise as to what you'll actually need.

you may need a souped up graphics card for example (although from the sounds of it probably not). so give us some more info.
 
I use Photoshop all the time and Indesign as well as Dreamweaver and an upload client like Filezilla. These are my predominant programmes.

I design graphics, logos, websites etc as well as t-shirts and so on... but I haven't yet ventured into 3D work etc...
 
Macbook Pro fella. Or as you say it will be stayin your office, howabout an iMac?

There's plenty of old threads on the Mac v Pc debate so I will not go there.

So buy a Mac.
 
Cheers, but that's not going to happen... for several reasons...

1. I don't like them
2. I can't afford one
3. I already have the makings of a good desktop if I go against a laptop
4. I don't like them... ;)
 
As the laptop is staying in the office what spec is the pc...

No point having a laptop if all it's going to do is stay 'plugged in'
 
Not 100% sure what specs the PC has as it was my Dads and I am yet to get it from him, my real query was is it worth upgrading it all, new graphics card, HDD memory, RAM etc?

Hopefully the spec will be awesome then! Just need advice on what hardware to buy to upgrade...
 
Lukas said:
Not 100% sure what specs the PC has as it was my Dads and I am yet to get it from him, my real query was is it worth upgrading it all, new graphics card, HDD memory, RAM etc?
Without knowing the original specs you can't really say if it's worth upgrading or not lol
 
Fair point, I'd say it was fairly high end, although it's quite old, as he is a big gamer so it would have a reasonably good spec wouldnt you say? Will find out soon though...
 
Lukas said:
Cheers, but that's not going to happen... for several reasons...

1. I don't like them
2. I can't afford one
3. I already have the makings of a good desktop if I go against a laptop
4. I don't like them... ;)

that's impossible!




no but seriously you don't have to have power to do low end cs4/cs5/cswhatever work. i ran a 2008 core 2 duo 2.13ghz macbook with 1gb ram and got by.

if you want a crazy powerful machine because you can, do it, but don't spend near the amount of a mbp on a pc, you'd just be wasting money doing that.
 
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