Good Laptop under $550?

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pickles

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Hello,

I am looking to buy a laptop at a budget of around $550 CAN (max $600 after shipping) that will be used for editing photos/video and gaming. I need this laptop to be capable of running Photoshop/Illustrator and playing games such as CS:S and DoD:S decently. The screen size doesn't really matter, so anything bigger then 13" will be fine, but it needs to have a dedicated graphics card (EDIT: I looked around and found that this is probably not going to happen in my budget, so not needed.). Things like a card reader and a Blu-Ray drive would be cool are definetely not required or needed. Also an OS is not needed.

Thanks in advance for any help I get.
 
Last edited:
you would be able to play dods and css on a 500$ laptop budget, but not anything cs4 or cs5.

You would need to double your budget at the least for running those programs (efficiently).

-Blue
 
Blue Stealth said:
you would be able to play dods and css on a 500$ laptop budget, but not anything cs4 or cs5.

You would need to double your budget at the least for running those programs (efficiently).

-Blue
Click to expand...

Ok, so if running Photoshop is out of then question, what do you suggest I get on my budget? Also, what about running CS3? Do CS4 and CS3 have the same system requirements to run?

Thanks.
 
pickles said:
Ok, so if running Photoshop is out of then question, what do you suggest I get on my budget? Also, what about running CS3? Do CS4 and CS3 have the same system requirements to run?

Thanks.
Click to expand...

casual use of photoshop would probably be alright on a 500-600 dollar budget, but any serious use of the program would not be appropriate on hardware for that price. Premier, vegas, or any serious video editing program would be out of the question.

As for running CS3, it depends upon the quality and type of work you are doing. Basic color changes and things like that will of course not use much memory or computing power. So it depends on the complexity of the tools within the program that you currently use.

Then you encounter the fact that while there are more complex tools in CS4 and CS5 than CS3, the later versions will most likely be more efficiently coded for the modern hardware types.

So to answer your question, we would need to know the type of photoshop work you usually do. Is it professional rendering and editing? or is it more casual/basic?

-Blue
 
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