Hi everyone, can you please recommend a suitable laptop???
I’m looking to buy a new laptop for graphic design and other tasks. I do most of my work connected to external monitors, both at home and in the office, so I don’t care much about the laptop screen size and quality. And I carry my laptop around with me every day and often take it to meetings outside the office, so I prefer it to be very lightweight. Lastly, I need it to be very powerful and handle multi-tasking well. On a normal day I will often be working on several heavy Photoshop files, an Indesign file or two, several heavy Excel sheets and 20-30 browsers tabs open, running a CRM program and heavy Google Sheets.
My current laptop, which is not handing this workload well:
14" Dell Vostro 5000, i7 processor, 8 GB RAM, an SSD drive, and an NVIDIA GeForce 930M card.
My budget for a new laptop is around $2500.
Do any of you own a very powerful laptop that can handle these tpye of tasks and weights up to 3 pounds that you recommend?
The closest I’ve found in my research is either a Dell XPS 15, Microsoft Surface Book 2, or a 15 inch Macbook Pro. But these options all weigh around 4 pounds and I am really hoping to find something lighter.
20-30 browser tabs open??? Along with a CRM? or because of the CRM?
My desktop soda couzy lean mean production machine at work with 16gigs ram, a hefty processor and access to two T-1 lines would struggle with 20-30 browser tabs open.
At home I do my work on a MacBook Pro 15" with 16gigs of ram and a larger option hard drive. Handles the large wide format photoshop and InDesign files I work with just fine. I also use Excel extensively so that may often be open as well. At max though, I limit the browser to 5 tabs and don’t have to deal with a work interface other than Dropbox (which can be a high maintenance, disk space eating PITA if you don’t keep on top of it… but that’s a whole other rant.)
Whatever laptop you get, get the largest on-board drive you can afford. And max out the ram. Most of these new model laptops cannot have ram added later. Soldered in at the factory. Also be sure it has the ports you need, especially if using in a presentation situation. A lot of them skimp on peripheral ports and rely far too much on wifi. If you switch to a mac, you may be buying a few additional adapters at $60 a pop to get your desktop monitors attached.
And yes, the multiple chrome tabs are mostly the CRM (Salesforce), as well as gmail, 1-2 heavy google sheets, calendar and other random tabs. 20-30 might be the higher limit, but easily I will have 10+ at almost any given moment.
I will look in to the MacBook Pro 15" some more. Would you say that with 16 gigs of RAM it should be able to handle this workload well? The 32 gig configuration starts to get REALLY expensive.
Ah the life of a sales rep. We use Saleschain, It’s specifically designed for the print and copy industry. My company gave (let me borrow) a Microsoft Surface Pro. Now, I’m not a PC fan by any means, I’m with Print Driver on the MacBook, But I have to say, the Surface handles really well. It’s compact, lightweight, comes with a clicky pen thingy, and other features i don’t know how to use. But it’s rather quick, responsive, and so far very reliable. Excellent battery life. Touch screen, which comes in handy for those not atuned to the mouse pad of portable computers.
Seems the pen is a wand for casting sorcery. I think. Pretty sure. and for presentations.