New laptop advice

Well, my laptop is full once again (photographs of course) and this time I am thinking of upgrading, to something not only with more memory but much faster. I am not interested in Mac, I want a PC (I am not going into the whys and wherefores, but please, no Mac recommendations).

I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations, I am looking for at least a 1tb hard drive, a minimum 4gb of RAM (upgradeable), and if I could find one with two drives in a RAID array for not too much money I would prefer that. Screen size 12-14 inches is preferable, a good screen, and not too heavy but sturdy enough to be lugged around in a wheeled bag through airports.

Any suggestions anyone?

AG - a suggestion -- I run my Aperture Library on its own dedicated portable external drive. OK it's not big enough for ALL your photos but these are getting bigger all the time

Thanks TT, I had not thought about that. However, I still need a new laptop, the screen sometimes goes a bit funny and I occassionally get blue-screen and it crashes..

ooh if your's is as bad as that - it does sound as if it's seen better days

My HD isn't that big - but it was OK and using the external for Aperture mens that photos do NOT fill up my HD .

My HD is tiny by modern standards - 160GB and it has 55GB still free.. My portable external is a 500GB so it should last me for a while

Yes, think I need a new one. I will think about your idea when looking for one, though, sounds like a good solution!

I picked up 2off Western Digital 1TB external drives for £58 each earlier in the year from Comet. (These arn't portable but they did have some that were). I'm sure other big sheds have similar offers from time to time
I use these for backups and storage (each backs up the other) so theoretically I could recover from a simultaneous PC and an external drive failure. (the second drive is only connected once/twice a week to abck up the one in use).

regards
Bernard

Thanks Bernard, I think I will go probably down that route, and just get a decent laptop and a couple of extra hard-dives.

Asus make good notebooks, including ones with quality 13" screens. You should be able to pick one up with an i-7 or i-5 Sandy Bridge processor. Some models come with integrated graphics, some with dedicated graphics cards.

I don't see the value in the bigger brand names like HP et al FWIW.

I am a fan of Dell Latitude models, one of them is 5 yrs old and is still working flawlessly... my latest one is a Latitude E4310 with i-5 560M CPU and 4 GB RAM, Win7 Ultimate.

As for the disk space - Seagate have a NAS (network attached storage) which has a good price/performance ratio - a review can be found here.. I think Maplin have the 2TB version for 130 quid (I have the 1 TB at home and use it also for printer sharing).

Thanks I-Berg and alexfilipov: I have just been looking at Asus laptops, they look quite good for the money.

As for NAS, I have a 2tb RAID setup already (Icybox). It is completely useless, my computer always has trouble finding it, and now it's basically a brick with two 1tb drives sitting idly in the corner of my lounge. Last time I managed to access it, it wanted me to format the disks, which have loads of stuff on them (thankfully backed up on other drives). I might see if I can get cradles to put the drives in and just use them as normal external hard drives; I won't be trying NAS again.

For storage this IcyBox link enclosure looks absolutely brilliant.

It has it's own docking bay on the PC and can also be pulled out and used anywhere else as a normal eSata USB enclosure.

I've got a similar one without the docking bay that I just use on an
eSata or USB (+power supply)leads. To change HDD's I just open the front flap slide the chassis forward and change drives. link

eSata is about 5x faster than USB2

I'd actually put the difference at 8x, I get consistent 150MB/s over eSATA and 20 max via USB.

And consider span's biiig boxes for lots of disks via a single eSATA connection. They look very practical indeed... and minimal software to screw up.

Bret