True System Requirements for Captivate plus multiple other programs?

[Lynne Michelle]

Looking to upgrade my laptop In order to produce more e-learning projects. I can find minimum system requirements for installing individual Adobe programs, but I am interested in finding out what is needed to have multiple programs running when creating projects (for instance: Captivate, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and other programs such as animation programs, audio recording, video making, PowerPoint etc.).  These programs seem to require a lot of "juice," and I can only run a couple at a time. Plus, the Captivate projects themselves can become quite large, and I've learned to store them on an external drive. Has anyone else found hardware requirements that allow them to work more seamlessly? ( I currently have an HP Elitebook Folio, 4GB, 64 bit operating system). Thank you!

[StevePixel · Accepted solution]

Hi Lynne,

You are correct, most Adobe products require both fast processors and lots of RAM. The best advice I ever received when purchasing new hardware is buy the biggest and fastest system you can afford as you will eventually require that new speed and power in the future, even if you don't need it now.

I would, however ask yourself, do you really need a laptop to do this? Given their compact size and compact resources they are usually a lot more expensive and under perform comparable desktops (Same CPU, Memory) you pay a lot more for the privilege of carrying it around.

I use two main systems, and a laptop to share progress with clients, but I never use the laptop for development.

Cheers

Steve

[Lilybiri]

My old (4yrs) desktop has i7 quad core, 32GB of RAM, two SSD and a big HDD and, very important a good NVidia card. It has only 2GB of RAM, will probably replace it by a 4GB graphics card. Laptop has 3GB NVidia and it works more smoothly (especially when combining with Photoshop, Audition and Illustrator). It also starts from a SSD of course.

I use a Surface Pro 4 (i7) as well (mostly when on the move), but due to the lack of a graphics card I avoid to multitask as much as on dekstop/laptop.

[RodWard]

I second all of the above recommendations about buying the fastest processor and as much RAM (at least 8 gig but 16+ is better), but I would also suggest that you should try to get a top of the range SSD drive as well.

I changed my 7500 rpm spinning disk over to a Samsung EVO SSD some time ago and was amazed at the difference it made to the performance of the entire PC (in my case it was a DELL laptop).  It would have at least doubled the performance.  I have now migrated that same 1 terabyte SSD over to my current HP laptop rather than using the hard drive that came with it.

[Paul Wilson CTDP]

Buy the best computer you can afford. Presently I'm running an Intel i7 processor, 16 GB of RAM, I have a solid state drive instead of a hard drive. If I was shopping today I would get the same but I would try to find a quad-core processor instead of the dual-core that I have right now. It's far from unusable but it is the weakest element of my system right now.