Picked up an ASUS G73JH laptop this week.
The D620 is getting old and tired, and it's out of warranty. I had the system board replaced 6 or 7 times in the 3 years of warranty due to a design flaw with the video card overheating.
Since I use it so much, and depend on it, I needed a backup, and I decided to replace the laptop first. The desktop is just too slow to use that much. So, the old laptop goes on the shelf as a backup for now.
I'll pick up a faster desktop sometime soon probably, but the new 85 1.4 is calling my name pretty loudly, so it comes first!
SPecs of the G73JH
Intel Core I7-740QM processor - 4 cores, 2 threads per core. 1.73 GHz
6 GB DDR3 memory, expandable to 8. While the MFG says 8 GB is the max, I've seen reports of people doing 16 GB online.
17.3 inch screen, 1600x900 resolution
640 GB SATA2 drive
Radeon HD 5870, 1 GB RAM built in. HDMI output for my big ole monitor too!
I also added a couple external drives to the mix this week, since I am out of disk space! The drives are combo USB/eSATA drives, 2 TB capacity. Actual usable space is around 1.8 TB each.
Did a little benchmarking, to see if the i7 is really as good as it sounded!
Test 1:
Combined 3 files into a HDR using LR3 and CS5
Old machine took 2:41
New machine took 1:52
This one wasn't a real common task for me, but I did note how making the HDR brought my system to its knees last time I tried it.
Test 2:
Took 562 RAW images I shot at a wedding last weekend, and converted them to JPG in LR3
Old machine took 54:21
New machine took 23:15
This test *is* a real world activity for me.
So, productivity has improved