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[patherine]

What are the most important features in a laptop for a photographer running adobe photoshop? My wife is looking to start getting into photography. She is starting to take classes and will be hopefully capable of running the best software from adobe. What are my most important features? Ram? Video Card? Processing Speed? Not too worried about hard drive because we can always get an external. Please advise, thanks.
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[ZaZ]

I'm curious, if she's just starting, does she need to have the latest and greatest? To some degree it will depend on what she's doing. Photoshop tends to be processor and memory intensive, though the newer versions can use the GPU for higher end stuff. If she's just cropping and touching up photos, that doesn't require a lot of processing power. Don't forget about getting a good screen, which unfortunately are in short supply these days. You may wish to consider the hard drive. A SSD is much more likely to make your system seem more responsive. Good Luck.

[A31]

patherine, your most important factors are RAM (2GB recommended), Hard disk space, must have a Pentium 4 or better, XP Pro SP2 or SP3, Vista SP1 or SP2 or Windows 7, these are the recommended specs for Photoshop CS4 Extended.

By the way, very often internal hard drives are cheaper than externals, just to let you know.

I'm curious, if she's just starting, does she need to have the latest and greatest?

I can recommend GIMP GNU Image Manipulation tool, download the latest stable release from the GIMP website (think it's version 2.6) - you can do all sorts with it and it is free unlike Photoshop! I also think it is better and it uses a lot less computer resources.

[SHoTTa35]

I would say the most important thing is your display. For photography you need accurate color reproduction and if your monitor is not showing you what you see with your eyes when you take a picture then you'll go mad tweaking it only to see it was good all along. For that you'll need a IPS display so get her a nice external one (24" should be good enough ).

After that then the stuff the other guys said above