Help me educate myself (new photo editing laptop)

[lphilpot (Len Philpot)]

@Tamas_Papp

This is why I always go to a brick & mortar store (the same one in Budapest) to choose a laptop. Their advice is usually helpful, once I tell them what I want they give a good recommendation, and they are acutely aware that if I have a problem the laptop ends up in their store and they have to deal with it. Now Asus has a mail-in warranty scheme, but under the law I still have the option of taking it to the store and letting them handle it. This is why they refuse to sell items that have these kind of generic problems (I know because once I wanted a model of a brand they did not keep in stock and they told me why).

The neat thing about warranty here is that once they tried repair 3 times, they would have to give me an identical, brand new item, or a full refund.

I’m not sure if the legal / warranty situation is the same here… I’ll have to check.

Also, although I much prefer being hands-on, I live in an area that’s not very big (~130k metro area at most). We have a Best Buy, the usual discount / department outlets and that’s about it. There are a few independent local computer companies ($$$$) but to find anything else it’s a 100+ mile drive. That’s certainly doable for some things, for example, I bought my truck from a deal 100 miles away. But the attractiveness of going that relatively far repeatedly kinds of diminishes with smaller purchases. But a good idea nonetheless.

On the topic of the Lenovo one neat feature I just read about is, it comes with a pen. When used on the laptop the (reasonably large) trackpad functions as a graphics tablet instead of a touchpad. Nice feature for mobile photo editing, even though I have a dedicated Wacom tablet for desktop use with an external monitor and keyboard.

Thanks.

[leendertv]

I agree, on Windows you need 32GB instead of 16GB for your needs.
But in my opinion RAM is not the bottleneck for photo editing when you choose a iGPU and 32GB RAM.

Plus, the integrated iGPU inside a modern Ryzen AI 7 (the Radeon 860M) is 3 to 4 times faster than what you have now, and it runs on memory that is much faster too.

Check the specs for Memory speed (DDR): 7,500 MT/s. There are also laptops with a Ryzen AI 7 processor that have 5,600 MT/s or 6,400 MT/s RAM.

For 4k video editing or 3d rendering you need dedicated graphics card.