Help Buying A Laptop?

[isiolia]

It doesn't matter which Intel HD you have, even their well made 4600 or above newest stuff, Adobe will not use it. If you even try and install Photoshop CC, CS, Lightroom, etc any of it, it will tell you that your video card isn't good enough and block you out. You need a dedicated card made roughly in the last 8 years.

Eh, that's not entirely true, though it does vary by application. Lightroom, for instance, does want a lot of VRAM, but is listed as working on some of the later Intel graphics. Others, like Premiere or After Effects, only spec a basic resolution as minimum...which many laptop panels may not meet. They do, of course, benefit from a supported GPU for acceleration features.

Either way, going with a discrete card certainly isn't a bad idea, but Creative Cloud stuff does tend to work on (newer) Intel graphics at least.

[Tanooki]

HD5000 should work, and newer Iris Pro stuff...here's a full list
https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/ph ... d-faq.html

You're right about LightRoom on RAM, but the primary photoshop seems to have an annoying higher bar to get over for photo editing.

[isiolia]

The older ones are simply not tested or officially supported though. Basic Photoshop requires less than Lightroom.

Go back far enough, of course, and you may not hit the 512MB required VRAM. I can't think of any time I've actually seen that happen (I have 40-odd users with CC licenses), but it certainly could.

[Tanooki]

Perhaps hit and miss.
The i5 laptop of mine she was using has the HD 3000 gfx that uses 1.75GB of system ram for itself, it won't boot over that alone. The PC was a dell inspiron 530 with a quad core core2duo in there with Vista, hated vista so it wouldn't even try and install there.

The vista box now has win8.1 on it, works fine, slow to fire up the app but fine once it is in there since it only has 3GB of ram to use, but it also has a radeon 6570 with 2GB of VRAM on it so that helps. That one has the upgraded foxconn dgm33m03 motherboard, so while dell and other source say 4GB cap, the board with a bios update can take 8GB of ram. I'm thinking more memory sticks are in order since the processor maybe from 9 years ago.

[darthmunky]

Why do alot of laptops no longer come with internal optical drives? I think that's essential. I refuse to use any external devices. And why no VGA? I use a 2nd monitor that does not have HDMI.

[isiolia]

Optical drives take up a lot of space, and overall use doesn't tend to warrant full-time inclusion at this point. There are still machines out there that have them, just saying, quite a lot don't, so it's a very restrictive requirement.

VGA, similarly, does not reflect what most users want/need. As I mentioned, it's not uncommon to have Displayport, which can typically be adapted - or can drive 4k screens and the like that VGA cannot - or be adapted to DVI, or HDMI, etc. It's a better starting point that's also a much smaller port to integrate.

[Tanooki]

I didn't think laptops had old VGA ports at all anymore really.

The sager setup I linked those default are designed a bit thicker as they are DIY style. You usually have a laptop setup that is made to be a possible RAID setup with 4 drive slots and usually you'll find a system with 1+2 HDDS (small SDD+HDD, etc) and then an optical drive in there. The body tends to have a HDMI and 1-2 more possible video ports, and as it was said you can tend to get some form of adapter too.

I really think the couple I linked under $900 would fit your needs other than VGA if you have to have that.