Any hint on portable computer for Lightroom

[ErikKaffehr]

Hi,

I'm considering portable computer mainly for Lightroom. My old portable is around 5 years so I think it's time to switch. Problem is that I found out that running LR on Windows XP seems to be a bad thing. I tried recently after my Mac went down. The main problem was that printing stopped to work, with an out of memory message. The computer has 2.2 GBytes of memory but Lightroom can only use about 716 MByte. So I was out of memory while I had about 1 GByte memory free.

Checking out different fora it seems to me that this 716 MByte limit is an issue with 32-bit Windows, should be no problem with 64-bit Windows. Most Windows laptops seem to support 32-bit windows. Some models support 64-bit Vista but they tend to be at the higher price tags. I'm aware that there are tricks that can be done (like the /3GByte flag) but it seems that it sometimes helps sometimes not.

Any suggestions?

Best regards
Erik

[Alexandre Buisse]

I'm successfully using windows 32bits for lightroom 2 and photoshop cs4 on my Lenovo X61s (it's a core 2 duo/2GB ram machine). I'm not sure of the memory consumption, but both LR and PS are very responsive when editing my 12MP D90 images.

[bduke]

I only run notebooks, both work and home, both are Dell Latitude D630s.  One XP (2 GB memory), one Vista Ultimate (4 GB memory), both 32 bit.  Neither is having any issues with LR 2.x.

Purchase the fastest processor you can afford, it is expensive to replace.  
Memory and disk space can always be added or replaced fairly inexpensively.  But plan for this, such as leaving a memory slot empty.

I would suggest a 7,200 RPM drive in the notebook for performance.

Bob Duke