I have been looking at a few. Basically i want a laptop with a 15.4 inch or 17 inch screen for all my scrapbooking and photo editing stuff along with an external hard drive.

My issue comes in when were specking these out. I need to know how important dedicated memory is. We were talking to the sales guy and said for doing what i want to do with it, i should have at least 128 MB of dedicated memory to my graphics, otherwise my graphics programs won't work.

Or is shared memory OK.

doesn't anyone know anything about this?

What laptops do you use? and does it do what you want???

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i can run photoshop v7 at my current ram amount. i haven't tried cs2 but i know my desktop ran cs2 slower and i have double the ram there, so i just use 7 until i can put more ram in it. i have 1 gig in my desktop, i only have 512 in my laptop.

my ram in my laptop is shared for graphics. it is working for me.

Yes, some of the filters are slower running, but I am only working with 512mb of ram here. Yes, sometimes the graphics take longer to render, but I am only working on 512mb of ram here.

I think with most laptops available today, if you max out the ram in the machine, you're gonna be just fine. But that is just my opinion.

BTW I have a 3yo HP Pavillion laptop. I can also run PS7 nicely on an 4+ yo HP laptop (can't remember the model).

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~*~ Stacey ~*~
Mother to 3 boys | Digital Scrapbooking Junkie | Web Designer | Digital Scrapbook Kit Designer

I have a gateway laptop and unless you are really going to be mobile I'd reconsider getting one. I am a writer so I use mine everywhere but I just started using it for scrapping and I wish the screen were much bigger, what I have is 14inches I think. Get more memory than you think you can ever use because it's harder to upgrade laptops. (so I've been told, I'm looking into this.) And above all buy the accident protection plan for a laptop. And because I mentioned the word accident make backing up files the last thing you do before you move that laptop anywhere. Don't ask me how I know.
Diana

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I got my HP laptop at Sam's club, it has a 17" monitor , I havnt had any problems with it yet.GREAT picture, 2 gigs of RAM, 100Gig HD.The price was great too, couldnt come close to it anywhere else.

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2 gig ram. ohh drooling! my desktop is only a year old and it doesn't have anywhere near that! get as much ram as you can afford, it's worth it. my computer does serious crunching sounds and runs slooow while scrapping.

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A dedicated grapghics card will alwasy give you better results on either a laptop or a desktop Jess - I have dedicated cards on both of mine and it makes quite a difference. You dont have to have it but it will improve performance.
MY laptop is a Dell - I mainly use it for work but I also have PSCS2 on it so I can scrap on the fly if I want to.
Its a widescreen with 1GBRAM, Dedicated 128MB graphics card ( my desktop has a 256MB graphcs card) and a DVD/CD burner so I only have a 40GB hard drive since i dont need to keep a lot of things on it anyway.
The article here http://scrapbook-bytes.com/cgi-scrip...icle_365.shtml applies to laptops as much as desktops

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Ditto what Shelleyrae said!

I was waiting to talk to my DH tonight since he is the computer expert, and I didn't want to mispeak. Shared memory literally is that. Your graphics card and your processor share memory so that 1 gig RAM is really only like 875Meg or if you get one that only has 512 RAM then it really is only like 388 Meg usable for your processes. And to top it off, generally the graphics card/chip in the laptop that is using shared memory and doesn't have its own dedicated memory (like Shelleyrae was talking about) are usually not as good of graphics cards/chips. And with a graphics intensive hobby like scrapbooking, you really do want a good one. We own a Dell as well because they are one of the few places you can get what you want, still for a pretty good deal. Right now they are having a sale for their anneversary (something like 22% off), just in case you want to check them out. But I did want to answer your initial question (in addition to what Shelleyrae wrote). I hope that helps!

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laptop = hard to upgrade.. more expensive to upgrade.. so, get the most you can right up front.

I would recommend nothing less than 3.0 ghz processor, 1GB of ram, dedicated graphics card with 512mb memory, 80gb hard drive and a DVD burner.. screen size, weight, size are all personal depending on if you are going to carry it with you. You might be tempted to get a 17" screen with all the bells and whistles.. for $999... but it weighs 10lbs! Try carrying that around and you'll quickly hate it. My laptop is older, but has 1 GB and 40GB HD and weighs only 4lbs... easy to carry, don't mind the portablity but it did cost $1500 back in the day. Just remember to really get something that fits what you need.. because unlike a desktop.. it's quite hard to upgrade.