Laptops and Monitors?

[Goldilocks]

 
Hi. I presently have a desktop, old Dell, Pentium II 800 gh, 256 ram with cd drive. I have a 19" CRT (I believe Phillips made it). The system was purchased in Aug. 2000 with a lot of use from my son.
I'm thinking of upgrading to a laptop HP Pavilon 15.4" widescreen, brightview, with Windows Media Center, 2 GB RAM 120 GB harddrive.
I use raw and jpegs (mostly raw for the pictures that I care about) Canon Powershot s70. Carrying weight is a big issue for me, because of a back injury. I can lift the laptop to carry a short distance (like into an airconditioned room or to the car to go to someone's house on a good day). I am not a professional, but serious amature, with a strong art painting background. I've heard people say that flat panel monitors aren't as good as the CRT. I want to be able to use different editing software. Right now, photoshop CS2 is barely making it on a limited basis without getting into a non-responsive mood.
Any thought or opinions from people with experience, I would appreciate to hear.

[nigeldh]

Check over on www.notebookreview.com for a very good notebook buying guide and other info - NotebookReview.com Forums > Hardware, Software and Accessories  > What Notebook Should I Buy?

My thoughts are:
1. Buy a Core Duo, dual core, laptop even if you have to stretch a bit.

2. On my x2 3800 Athlon desktop with 2 gig of memory, I don't see more than 1 gig of memory used so you would have to do some serious Photoshop work to need 2 gig. Memory is easy to add and often much cheaper from a 3rd party, even a Best Buy or CompUSA, than the manufacture when buying the laptop.

3. Get a real graphics chip not the built-in Intel graphics - nVidia 6150, ATI 200 or x1300/1400.

4. Get a DVD burner in your laptop. Some laptop DVD drives will also work with DVD-RAM media - preformatted 4.7 gig media that works like a very large floppy disk.

5. If you can put up with a 13" screen, Sony has several really nice notebook computers in the 2 kg, 4.4 lb, weight range - Core Duo, x1400 graphics,

Yes, one can really notice the difference between a 2 kg and a 3 kg or 4kg notebook when carrying it around. I have luged around a Dell Insperion 8000 for many years, 4kg plus travel weght. Now at work I am using an IBM T41 Thinkpad, about 2.5 kg travel weight.

best of luck, Nigel