Laptop for photo-editing, and some other stuff

[dunelmmat]

My current laptop (Sony Vaio Intel Core Duo CPU T6400 2GHz, 4GB RAM though only 2.97 seems to be being used) is feeling a bit old and I want to replace it with a future-proofed laptop whose most onerous task will be photo and video editing at home, but also needs to be reliable as my job often means I travel and am away for months with no ability to get it repaired at all till I get back. Whilst away it needs to cope with films (incl blueray) and gaming. I care more about value for money than cost. I reckon on 15" as it has to be both a desktop replacement as well as be portable. I have a decent monitor I can attach to it, but opinions on whether a gloss screen or matte screen will be better (particularly for the photo-editing) are welcomed - it needs to cope with darkened rooms, artificial lighting, and natural light. I assume lots of RAM will help, but I notice I can get cheaper 16GB RAM or more expensive 8GB RAM - can anyone tell me the pros and cons? Sometimes when away the wireless I have access to has a very weak signal, how much difference do the wireless cards make?

Also how much better are the i3,5,7 processors than what I have or should I just try and re-install everything on my computer, though it always struggled with heavy photo work. Everyone tells me to get a Mac, but my wife has one and I don't like it.

Are SSDs as good as my geeky friends are telling me?

All advice welcome from someone who used to know about computers in the days of FORTRAN, but is now relatively clueless.

Thanks in advance,

 

[HonestFlames]

I'm from computers from the days of Commodore Vic-20's and BASIC, but I've stayed current with most things

Photo editing can be done with any laptop with as much RAM as you need being dictated purely by the megapixels of your camera, the number of layers you work with and whether you work with RAW or JPEG format. If you have an expensive camera and care greatly about image quality, then you will likely benefit from 8GB or even 16GB RAM.

Video editing is best done on a laptop with plenty of CPU and (these days) GPU power. GPU power will probably be more important if you're using video editing software that makes use of one. I'm not expert on video editing software, but Sony Vegas can put a GPU to good use. Many swear that an i7 CPU is the absolute king for video editing / encoding. Benchmarks tend to show this is true, though I haven't seen specific mobile i7 benchmarks, I have no reason to doubt they would give similar results.

I'm about to enter into the world of SSD's in the form of a few 256GB Plextor M3 Pros. These are Marvell chipset based, rather than the normal Sandforce. Performance is better with Marvell, in most cases. The "550MB/s" figures you see quoted for SSD's are when they are given very compressible data to store, which is exactly what video *isn't*. Marvell based SSD's win on incompressible data transfer speeds. Of course, they are far from the cheapest.

Oh, and the AUO matte screen would be best for you, as I believe it has the widest colour gamut of any of the options available.