Advice on laptop hardware for Adobe CS 5.5

[Jon1984]

Hello all

As the topic title says, I'm needing a recommendation for a friend at work on a laptop for Adobe CS 5.5, basically Photoshop and Illustrator, maybe a bit of Flash and Fireworks also. I was wondering if an I7 with HD 3000 would do a good job. I suspect that Photoshop and Illustrator will be taxing the cpu and hard drive a bit more than the gpu correct?

Thank you for your feedback

[Airmantharp]

While I'm not familiar with laptops in general (they're such a moving target), I can suggest some guidelines:
1. The screen. You want 1080p+, IPS, with good contrast and color reproduction. It has to be flexible enough to be calibrated to your needs.
2. The CPU. You want a quad-core i7 with hyperthreading- be specific here. In the mobile arena, Intel's 'i7' moniker can mean anything.
3. RAM. The laptop should preferably have four slots and be able to accommodate 16GB, if not more, depending on your budget.
4. Storage. A decent sized SSD along with a larger 7200RPM drive would be ideal, but going for something like a hybrid drive or using an mSATA SSD for caching would probably be a good compromise.

Less important but definitely nice to have:
1. Solid and durable chassis.
2. Quality keyboard with a good layout and a quality touchpad.
3. Good speakers.

I don't think having a discrete GPU would help you much, except in the case of drivers; someone else will have to help you there, but I do know Nvidia's Optimus technology seems to be preferable for ease of use and battery consumption. The HD3000 is more than powerful enough, and you may find it's Quicksync function to be useful.

A price, size, and weight range would also be helpful, as well as any specific dislikes.

[Jon1984]

As for the screen, it will be connected most of the time to a 1080p HP screen at the office. A quad core is a must, like a i7-2670QM. As for ram 8GB will be enough i guess. The HDD will be more dificult, puting an SSD in a 1000 Euro budget will be hard... But a good 7200rpm hard drive will be ok though? Maybe we can find something with ssd caching