What's the best laptop to use with Photoshop CS5?

UPDATE FOR PHOTOSHOP CC (Also could be applied to Photoshop CS6)

Currently Photoshop CC is known to work in Current Mac OSX Windows7 and Windows 8 without any major issues. However in general if you are planning on Buying a Photoshop Laptop I have some recommendations you should keep in mind:

• Current operating systems and background processes plus a web browser can use as much as 2-3GB of Ram alone, Adobe Bridge can use a lot of Ram sometimes as well. While you can get by on 4GB I highly recommend 6-8GB as a minimum for working in Photoshop and closing all other apps including the web browser if at all possible.
• Try to get a laptop with dedicated video graphics rather than shared. The new Mercury performance engine is designed to take some the burden off the processor and ram by utilizing the GPU and OpenGL.
• Try and get a laptop with more than one hard drive if possible, or swap the optical drive for a SSD.
  
• 3D objects when rendered in Photoshop will take up a lot of processing power, make sure you have Dual Core processors at 2.0GHz or better, Quad Core processors are ideal though. I recommend the i7 and a i5 as minimum requirement.

More information is available on my blog post here: http://robertoblake.com/blog/2013/06/thoughts-on-buying-a-photoshop-cc-laptop

I hope this helps.

How to tune Photoshop CS5 for peak performance: http://adobe.ly/PSCS5_Performance

How to set up a great Photoshop machine: http://adobe.ly/918Vep

Roberto has given you a wealth of information, the only area I would suggest caution is in the use of SSD's; I've been using them for a couple of years now and have installed 2 of them in my latest desktop build; I won't go back to a mechanical drive for my OS and apps! As far as Bang-for-your-$ is concerned, SSD's are the best investment you can make as far as performance is concerned, but you do have to be careful that the system is optimized to use them. 

The biggest concern with SSD's is that they literally wear out, just like an LP record or cassette tape, as you use them. What wears them is writing to them; each individual memory cell in the drive has a finite number of write cycles it can go through before it "dies" and becomes read only.  Reading does not affect the life of the drive in any way, so the optimum set-up is to have an SSD as your OS and Applications drive, that way once you've installed your OS - I'm assuming you'll be using Win7 64 Bit - and your applications, most of the activity will be reads.

Again I'm assuming you'll have at least one SSD and one 7200rpm mechanical drive in your notebook; to minimise the number of writes to the SSD I would suggest that after you install your OS you move your "Profile" to the spinner, all the temporary log files, internet files, cookies etc etc etc that Windows generates, as well as downloads, follow your profile and so won't be written to the SSD. Google is your friend here, and a quick search will show you how to do this.

For the same reason, I actually installed my Antivirus suite on one of my spinners as it updates itself endlessly, and given that it runs in the background I don't care how fast or slow it is! LOL! SSD's are insanely complex in their operation, and this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_amplification is a fantastic article that will give you a good insight into the core technologies and principles used in their operation.

Given all that I've just said, using an SSD as a scratch disk for Photoshop is obviously not a good idea(!), but I'm doing exactly that on my new build as I mentioned. I am in the process of "recycling" my original OS/Apps SSD as a Photoshop scratch disk; this will speed up Photoshop itself by orders of magnitude, and it will be interesting to see how long it lasts! LOL!

SSD's are all about speed, so using them externally is a problem; your connection will be the bottleneck in the system. I recently saw a demonstration where a 16GB movie file was transferred off an external SSD drive into a Macbook Pro via the Thunderbolt connection in under 1 minute!!! As far as I know, Intel have yet to license the Thunderbolt technology to any Windows OEM's, so I would suggest you get a notebook, and external SSD, with a USB 3 connection; the relative speeds are as follows...

e-SATA: 300MB/s

USB 3: 625MB/s

Thunderbolt: 1.25GB/s (Bi-directional!)

Wow, I didn't mean to go on at this length, but I have one final suggestion as follows; if you do go the external SSD Photoshop scratch disk route, please make sure that the SSD you use does not have a Sandforce controller. Again, this is all horribly complex, so some Googling on the subject will help you; basically the controller is where the "magic" happens in an SSD, not the actual NAND flash chips themselves. The fastest drives out there use Sandforce controllers, but they will slow down, in cases to almost spinner speeds or even worse, if they have to handle data that cannot be compressed, such as - you guessed it! - image files, movies, and music!

Good luck! 

Paul

You can get a great desktop for $1000 or so, but don't know much about laptops.

To get an computer for what you want many advise having at least 3 internal drives, a good video card, and probably 16 gigs of memory or more.