Small cheap portable laptop for editing on holiday (1 Viewer)

[Tony Knight]

I have a very old Acer 500gb laptop that i bought for c£200 >10 years ago which I take with me on holiday just for photo storage, editing and occasional internet access. The older and more battered it looks the better, as the less nickable it looks ! However....the battery as you'd expect is now almost dead and so barely usable when not connected to power, plus the upgraded windows OS makes it is now very slow. What is the best suggestion for a small portable cheap light replacement that will probably just be used for storage and running photoshop program ? All the small kit I look at seems to have only 128/256 gb storage which isn't enough....the 500gb HD laptops are then so much more expensive. I currently use a datastick as a back up but don't really want to use a 256/512gb datastick as prime storage and then try to back that up through the laptop to a similar datastick - it will get too complicated !

EDIT - I suppose a cheap external 256gb external drive for £20-30 connected through one USB and backed up through the laptop to the datastick in another USB port would work but presume processing photos on an external drive would be slower than on a laptop hard drive....

Thanks
Tony

 

[ChrisMc1957]

Not sure if this helps you or not, but earlier this year I bought an Asus ExpertBook, its a great little laptop, very fast and extremely lightweight, I take it with me on holiday/abroad etc when I might need to do some editing of photos etc. It wasn't cheap, but it fits my usage perfectly.

I back all my photos etc up to Dropbox which I can access from anywhere with a WiFi connection, so not much gets stored on the laptop.

Spec
ASUS ExpertBook B9 B9400CEA-KC0182X - 14" - Intel Core i7 1165G7 - Evo - 16 GB RAM - 1 TB SSD

 

[Georgebirds]

I got this one recently, as it was the only cheapish laptop with 1TB storage I could get at short notice (my previous one perished in a house fire, so it was a quick replacement rather than a carefully researched and chosen purchase!)

https://www.argos.co.uk/product/1231782?clickSR=slp:term:1tb%20laptop%20asus:2:100:1

Really easy set-up, even for someone not techy minded and used to an older cheap Acer laptop like the one you're using, it's pretty light and feels robust enough to take around on trips, starts up in seconds and (so far) been very reliable, no crashes or programmes freezing.

It does seem weird to me, that all the others have SUCH a small storage capacity, but I suppose more people today pay for Cloud storage than wanting to store it free it on a hard drive in their home?

The 1TB is set up as a separate drive on the laptop, so you can save to the small C drive as usual, or the D drive where there's room for a lot more. It's fractionally slower to open folders from D, but not enough to be annoying - I tend to use the C as a quick temporary dumping place for batches of photos taken, then once I've had time for the whole sort/edit/delete-the-rubbish/backup session, I move the ones I'm keeping over to D where they'll live permanently, all nicely sorted into location folders.

I would also recommend keeping up with that data stick (or external hard drive) backup, though, that's the only reason I still have my twenty years of nature/pet/places-visited photography after the fire - the laptop burnt but the backup was in a different room and I salvaged my entire 'life in photos' from there.

 

[Peter.home]

Purely for backing up photos, and uploading to internet, I have repurposed an old Chromebook.
It has a microsd port, and WiFi to back up in cloud.

Microsd cards eg £30 for 512gb seem really cheap these days, card readers cheap as well.

 

[Tony Knight]

I got this one recently, as it was the only cheapish laptop with 1TB storage I could get at short notice (my previous one perished in a house fire, so it was a quick replacement rather than a carefully researched and chosen purchase!)

https://www.argos.co.uk/product/1231782?clickSR=slp:term:1tb%20laptop%20asus:2:100:1

Really easy set-up, even for someone not techy minded and used to an older cheap Acer laptop like the one you're using, it's pretty light and feels robust enough to take around on trips, starts up in seconds and (so far) been very reliable, no crashes or programmes freezing.

It does seem weird to me, that all the others have SUCH a small storage capacity, but I suppose more people today pay for Cloud storage than wanting to store it free it on a hard drive in their home?

The 1TB is set up as a separate drive on the laptop, so you can save to the small C drive as usual, or the D drive where there's room for a lot more. It's fractionally slower to open folders from D, but not enough to be annoying - I tend to use the C as a quick temporary dumping place for batches of photos taken, then once I've had time for the whole sort/edit/delete-the-rubbish/backup session, I move the ones I'm keeping over to D where they'll live permanently, all nicely sorted into location folders.

I would also recommend keeping up with that data stick (or external hard drive) backup, though, that's the only reason I still have my twenty years of nature/pet/places-visited photography after the fire - the laptop burnt but the backup was in a different room and I salvaged my entire 'life in photos' from there.

That looks a great deal but 15.6 inches is probably just too large for my rucksack cabin luggage. Current laptop is about 13 inches and just fits - I'll have to check to see if they do a smaller one as otherwise it looks perfect and just about in the price range I wanted for a small back up travel laptop....

 

[Georgebirds]

Forgive me if this is stating the obvious, but are you measuring diagonally or horizontally? Laptop screen sizes are quoted diagonally corner to corner like tvs, but measuring directly across the laptop from one side to the other, it's only 14 inches wide. If the rucksack would stretch just that little bit further? Unless you were already doing a diagonal line to get that 13 inch measurement on your current one, in which case ignore this hope to help!

 

[Tony Knight]

Forgive me if this is stating the obvious, but are you measuring diagonally or horizontally? Laptop screen sizes are quoted diagonally corner to corner like tvs, but measuring directly across the laptop from one side to the other, it's only 14 inches wide. If the rucksack would stretch just that little bit further? Unless you were already doing a diagonal line to get that 13 inch measurement on your current one, in which case ignore this hope to help!

Thanks - but yes I was already measuring diagonally. Maybe time to get a new rucksack ? .....though I need to be able to get it and all the camera equipment including back up bridge camera into an overhead cabin locker !

 

[Steve Babbs]

I take a tablet and back up to a usb memory stick but I leave my editing until I get home. I'd never have time on a trip anyway.

 

[Tony Knight]

I got this one recently, as it was the only cheapish laptop with 1TB storage I could get at short notice (my previous one perished in a house fire, so it was a quick replacement rather than a carefully researched and chosen purchase!)

https://www.argos.co.uk/product/1231782?clickSR=slp:term:1tb%20laptop%20asus:2:100:1

Really easy set-up, even for someone not techy minded and used to an older cheap Acer laptop like the one you're using, it's pretty light and feels robust enough to take around on trips, starts up in seconds and (so far) been very reliable, no crashes or programmes freezing.

It does seem weird to me, that all the others have SUCH a small storage capacity, but I suppose more people today pay for Cloud storage than wanting to store it free it on a hard drive in their home?

The 1TB is set up as a separate drive on the laptop, so you can save to the small C drive as usual, or the D drive where there's room for a lot more. It's fractionally slower to open folders from D, but not enough to be annoying - I tend to use the C as a quick temporary dumping place for batches of photos taken, then once I've had time for the whole sort/edit/delete-the-rubbish/backup session, I move the ones I'm keeping over to D where they'll live permanently, all nicely sorted into location folders.

I would also recommend keeping up with that data stick (or external hard drive) backup, though, that's the only reason I still have my twenty years of nature/pet/places-visited photography after the fire - the laptop burnt but the backup was in a different room and I salvaged my entire 'life in photos' from there.

Hi George - do you run photoshop or any other editing software on the laptop ? I assumed it would fine to load and use Photoshop but I note under the questions on the Argos page the following Q&A which surprised me;
"Q- Will this laptop run photoshop well?
A - The supplier has advised the following for the ASUS X515 15.6in Celeron 8GB 1TB 128GB Laptop Bundle Silver:
No, it's not likely to. Looking at the minimum spec requirements for that, you will need a more powerful laptop with at least an “i5 and preferably with a graphics card”.
The supplier advises that something like the ASUS Vivobook 14X 14in i5 16GB 512GB Laptop Bundle - Silver (model no: K3405ZF-LY134W), cat no: 363/7322, may be more suitable. "
My old crappy Acer runs it perfectly well so having planned to buy it (and already bought a bigger rucksack!) not sure what to do now....

 

[Tony Knight]

Maybe this would be better - smaller, lighter, same price. Never heard of MSI as a brand though....

https://www.currys.co.uk/products/msi-modern-14-14-laptop-intel-core-i3-512-gb-ssd-black-10266945.html

 

[Tony Knight]

Thanks for the advice. I ended up buying this which should be fast enough and light enough to do the trick. It will only be used for storing and editing photos on trips so the 512 gb should be fine given I usually only use 70-150gb for photos on any trip and then remove all onto main pc when I get home.
Tony https://www.currys.co.uk/products/m...-intel-core-i5-512-gb-ssd-black-10266452.html

 

[Peter.home]

Thanks for the advice. I ended up buying this which should be fast enough and light enough to do the trick. It will only be used for storing and editing photos on trips so the 512 gb should be fine given I usually only use 70-150gb for photos on any trip and then remove all onto main pc when I get home.
Tony https://www.currys.co.uk/products/m...-intel-core-i5-512-gb-ssd-black-10266452.html

And old Chromebook, mentioned above, worked really well for backup onto microSD, and uploading to cloud during a recent trip.
A couple of days the accomodation WiFi, or me! Were too sluggish to upload the day's pics, so a few days were combined.

Editing would have relied on the web version of lightroom, which I suspect would have been slow.

Was a good solution, but if it works on a Chromebook, then it'll work even better on a Windows laptop.

 

[Peter.home]

And old Chromebook, mentioned above, worked really well for backup onto microSD, and uploading to cloud during a recent trip.
A couple of days the accomodation WiFi, or me! Were too sluggish to upload the day's pics, so a few days were combined.

Editing would have relied on the web version of lightroom, which I suspect would have been slow.

Was a good solution, but if it works on a Chromebook, then it'll work even better on a Windows laptop.

I've now realised where I have gone wrong in the past trying to back up direct from camera to android phone to cloud. The android (and kindle tablets) are restricted by only recognising fat32 formatted cards, via a card reader. So maximum 32gb SD cards.

My camera has 2 slots, so 1 can be a 512gb SD card for the whole trip, the other can be the backup slot, taking 32gb cards, copying them to the phone, then uploading to the cloud, and then erasing and reusing the 32gb cards.

Then at the end of each day, assuming WiFi! I have 1 copy in the camera, and 1 copy in the cloud.

Just camera and phone required, (and a heavy duty box of SD cards!) which was my goal.