Originally Posted by vvvvv

First let's talk about the hard drive. Seek times and read times for the hard drive are important when doing everyday tasks. Your hard drive should run at 7200rpms minimum and 10,000 would be good.

When you first open Photoshop it is your hard drive that is doing all of the work.

Now on to memory. When your computer runs out of memory it pages portions of memory to your hard drive. So let's say you have 15 tabs of chrome open, Photoshop, dream weaver, 5 notepads, color cop, stats remote, 2 putty Windows, and 5 more apps you use. Also lets say you have 4 gigs of ram.

You will notice when you switch from chrome to Photoshop there is a huge lag. Particularly when you haven't used Photoshop for a while. That lag is your computer paging Photoshop back into memory. If you had 12 gigs of ram your computer would not have paged anything to the hard drive and your computer would zip along as you multitask through your apps.

As stated before, doing encoding on a laptop is not a good idea. Many reasons why.

1. A laptop uses more expensive equipment that is meant to last less time. So using it all of the time will cause a failure quicker than in a computer.

2. Laptops don't have cooling systems that work as well as a computer. So you are going to overheat the components and have a failure quicker.

3. Laptops graphics chips don't have all of the bells and whistles that a computer graphics card has. So you will encode a lot slower.

4. Laptop CPUs don't have as much cache or as many pipes as a CPU in a computer so they encode slower.

However, if you are going to encode on location in a hotel and send the results to a client you should check to see if your encoding software can use CUDA to encode faster and then find a laptop with graphics that also use it. Doing so can cut down on time to encode dramatically.