Small Travel PC Laptop

[AlRohrer]

<p>I'm looking for a small (14" or under), fast, tough laptop to travel in a backpack, on foot, in commercial vehicles and my truck. It also may serve for shooting tethered on location and must run PS CS6 and well as some Lightroom. I'll use it extensively for writing so a decent keyboard is a plus. I would really prefer USB3 to connect my external drives and CD/DVD burner (Bluray okay but not necessary) but could get by with only USB2. <br>

Absolutely nothing larger than 14" but smaller would be okay, weight not an issue nor is extended battery life. 2-3 hours would be acceptable but longer would be better. Must run Windows 7 (Professional preferred) and prefer Intel i5 or i7. <br>

Two things. NO MAC! Please do not try to sell me on a Mac! They are an excellent machine but I am set up for PC and have some knowledge on them and at 65 years old, don't feel like starting over again. There are plenty of PCs out there so I'm after one of them. Second, money is an object. This year, I bought a Lenovo W520 and it is my ideal laptop but it just won't fit in my pack (and no, I am not going to a bigger backpack) so I'm keeping it on my desk hooked to an external monitor and a series of external hard drives. I would love a Lenovo x220 but it is about twice the money I want to spend on a travel laptop used mainly to backup and cull.<br>

I want a small laptop, inexpensive, reasonably fast, decent screen, good (for it's size) keyboard, and able to hold up to travel. If you have experience with one you recommend or one you don't recommend, please advise me. If you have no personal experience with them, please let those who do have the floor. <br>

Thank you,<br>

Al Rohrer</p>

[john_harper9]

<p>Al, I see that the newest Ultrabooks have USB 3.0, so shop looking for "Ultrabook" branding. I have bought Asus in the past - don't have experience with Lenovos. IMHO, the feel of the keyboard is my top priority for chosing notebooks, and the support agreement second.<br>

John</p>

[carbon_dragon]

<p>That's a shame because the 11" or 13.3" MacBook Airs seems perfect otherwise. My own 13" has Parallels running on it which allows me to run Windows 7 in a window and do all my PC stuff. My home iMac has bootcamp running Windows 7 and Parallels running Windows XP and both operate very well. An 11" Air running bootcamp and windows 7 would be a pretty sweet travel laptop.</p>

<p>I'd stay away from netbooks if you're going to do a lot of computationally intensive photo processing, they just don't have the firepower. Any Ultrabook you buy is going to be a poor imitation of the Air since Apple really created this particular niche. Hey I program PCs for a living and I use macs at home. The Air is my best computer ever and I have the one from two versions back. And just to add spice to the cake, with a PC you're limited to Lightroom (which is a great program to be sure). With a Mac you can get Aperture OR Lightroom depending on which you like better. </p>

<p>If you're sure about your PC choice I'd go to a Best Buy or a Micro Center and try out some of the laptops to see if you like the form factor and weights. But stop into the Mac section too, just so you can say you tried everything.</p>

[AlRohrer]

<p>John, thanks. I'm looking at the Ultrabooks now but they are still slightly more money than I hoped to pay.<br>

David, I'm not real computer savvy so taking on a new system at my age would be more of an undertaking than I'm interested in, especially when the PCs meet my needs and I already have experience with them. I have been to an Apple store and a BestBuy that had an Apple display and was impressed with the product. Right now, I have all the software I'll possibly ever need and no need to move up. I've spent enough time learning Lightroom, don't intend to start over with another program.<br>

Again, thanks John and David for your input. More is welcome.</p>

[waltflanagan]

<p>What is your actual budget?<br>

http://www.newegg.com/ultrabooks</p>

<p>Then sort by price, cheapest is $680. If that's too much then I'm afraid you're SOL unless you find a great coupon code somewhere. There are plenty of cheaper laptops but they're either bigger or netbooks and underpowered although still usable.</p>

[David_Cavan]

<p>I bought a Toshiba Portege laptop last year for travel & working in the field. It may be a little above your price limit, but it was the lightest and most powerful machine on the market at that price point (around 850, if I recall correctly), with a good screen for editing / culling in the field. It runs for over 5 hours on a charge, which is also good when you're not in a place to easily charge it. It fits into the back of my camera bag, and adds around only 3 lbs to the load. Its likely at the top of your budget, maybe over, but I've been very happy with the decision.</p>

[carbon_dragon]

There's a carbon fiber macbook Air clone coming out for windows soon. Supposedly it's pretty powerful and very

lightweight because of the carbon fiber. It's the Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon. It's a sort of money is no object solution. I

know I advised against the netbook option because I have doubts of it running CS6 very well (because the CPU and the

graphics chip is so bad) but it certainly is the cheap option. Wouldn't want to use it a lot though. Maybe you should think

about different systems for at home and in the field?

 

 

Be sure to tell us what you ultimately buy.

[travismcgee]

<p>I'm typing on a Lenovo X220 ultra-portable right now. Small, light and fast. Good XPS screen and a 7200 rpm hard drive, which is rare on a laptop. Intel i5 and Win 7 Professional 64-bit. But the real reason I bought it is the keyboard. Lenovo ThinkPads like this have outstanding keyboards...for laptops. More expensive, as you say, but worth it in my humble opinion. Life is too short for slow computers. Cheers.</p>

[jimstrutz]

<p>There are several current ultrabooks that use the second generation (Sandybridge) Core i5 & i7 CPUs. These have just started to be replaced by a whole bunch of 3rd generation CPU (Ivybridge) ultrabooks, so I expect we will see the older ones being discounted to clear out stock. I saw an ad for a $1000 Core i5 ultrabook with decent specs on sale for under $600 today and I bet that will drop over then next few weeks. You might want to peruse a few discount seller websites to see what is available now, and sign up for their email sales flyers, or check to see their sales every day. </p>

<p>The Ivybridge versions are a little faster and have a little better battery life and they all have USB3 as that is built into the CPU now. Most existing ultrabooks don't have anything faster than USB2.</p>

<p>For and even cheaper option... I bought one of the better netbooks for travel and found that Lightroom is painfully slow, but Corel AfterShot Pro works fine on it. I didn't buy it thinking photo editing would even be possible but it is with some cheaper programs. Don't buy a netbook with the common 10" screen though; the miserably low resolution sucks. The 11" netbbook screens are 1366x768 (as much as most 15" screens) and work far better for everything. Right now Costco has an Acer Aspire One with half decent specs for $350. --- Don't expect miracles though, it's still a rather slow computer compared to any of the ultrabooks. I just suggest it as a low cost, light weight option that can work with some concessions.</p>

[angkordave]

<p>I'm not knocking PCs as Windows 7 is a good operating system. What really lets PCs down is USB3. My experience of USB3 has been disappointing compared to Firewire 800 which has read and write speeds far in excess in practice than USB drives I have used. I've just spent over hour transferring 79gb to a Transcend USB3 drive using a PC with USB3 port I hasten to add. FW800 would take 1/3 of the time. I get up to 3Gb or more per min using Lacie and Western Digital drives.<br /> Maybe Ive bought the wrong drives; but FW was significant reason to move over to a Mac based system. Perhaps there might be a few high end PC laptops that use FW800 (I had both an old Sony and Lenovo which had the early FW200 which wasn't that much faster than USB2)<br /> I suggest that if a laptop has this option FW800 is a far faster option than USB3.</p>

 

[AlRohrer]

<p>@Walt: I was trying for under $600.00 but that may not be feasible.<br />@David Cavan: My daughter loves her Toshiba so I have been looking at them.<br />@David W. Griffin: I've read about the X1 Carbon and it might break my budget but it's definitely a possibility.<br />@Dave Collett: The X220 would have already been in my backpack if it had came with USB 3. Instead, I bought a W520 and it's too big for my backpack. Love it though. The keyboard on it is a huge selling point for me. It's still in the running at double what I budgeted. (Don't tell my wife!).<br />@Jim Strutz: Will have my eye open for bargains. Need to buy by the first of October so have a little time. Decided against a netbook, at least for now.<br />@Dave Perkes: Have USB 3 on my W520 and a WD external drive with USB 3 and it is so much faster than my USB 2 drives that I don't need to consider anything else. Being compatible with USB 2 drives is also a bonus. I don't need the fastest, just fast enough.<br />Thanks, everyone. Unless something else comes out before I make my move, I'll probably break my budget and go with a Lenovo. Hope my wife doesn't break my head!</p>