Looking to upgrade my Laptop

[bluesilver (Peter)]

Hi, I am currently looking to upgrade my current old laptop as is starting to cause some issues.
I am just hoping i can find some information on what i should be looking for processor wise and all that, I am not that up to date with what is what pc wise.

But the plan is to run all my gear of the laptop as i am doing now, but would also like to do the processing on it also, this is something that i am not currently doing on my current laptop.

I guess i want something that can run Pixinsight without any issues if i eventually do get Pixinsight.

This may be a very broad question, but any suggestions of what i should be looking for would be appreciated.
Like 16GB Ram or more, memory, chip ?

It also looks like everything is now coming out with Windows 1, will Ascom, Stellarium, APT, SharpCap all work with windows11 ?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated,
Cheers.

[rustigsmed (Russell)]

Capturing data isn't too intense on a laptop, as long as you have usb 3 and an ssd / nvme.
PI will be more dependent on RAM and the number of cores the cpu has.
I'd probably get something with 8core&16 threads as a minimum (modern intel / amd options are both more than capable).
You probably want to get a good IPS colour screen too for processing. you may want a largish screen if you are processing (15 inch and up).



the main problem is that laptops seem to come with puny Nvme storage size or low ram unless you go for the high end models. I recently purchased an msi stealth studio 14" which i will use for capture, travel and some light gaming (and probably some processing too).


I got it for its good screen and the ability to upgrade the RAM and NVME storage quite easily (although it only has one spot for storage). I took out the 1tb nvme which had win11 on it and put in a 4tb nvme and installed linux. I also replaced the 16gb ram with faster 64gb ram. it is easy to do if you laptop is able to do so (unfortunately it is hard to find out if it is easy to do or not - searching for tear down reviews is a good start). If you are happy to risk tinkering i'd suggest you could save a bit of money by upgrading storage and ram rather than purchasing the amount you are after / prebuilt.

[sharkbite]

Echoing what Russel said...(But cheaper)

I recycled a kiddies Dell xps13 with an i7 in it....

I didn't bother with the RAM - just upgraded to 1TB NVME, and a new battery.(NVME is MUCH faster than HDD/SSD)
The whole update cost around $100

Don't know about pixinsight, but it flies with AS!3, DSS etc.

1TB was enough for me - its sufficient for a few hours of planetary when capturing to .ser files -

1tb is effectively "infinite" storage for my deep sky - i typically delete the capture files once i'm happy with my final image.

[bluesilver (Peter)]

Appreciate the replies and advice.
When looking for options, I find for example, this is good for video editing.
Is stacking images, like in DeepSky Stacker the same as editing video
Or is editing video files completely different from processing images file like with DeepSky Stacker?
I hope that all makes sense.

I did find some information/review that was based on Photoshop
They recommended the AMD Ryzen 9-5900HX

But still trying to work all this out at the moment.

[sharkbite]

Originally Posted by bluesilver

Appreciate the replies and advice.
When looking for options, I find for example, this is good for video editing.
Is stacking images, like in DeepSky Stacker the same as editing video
Or is editing video files completely different from processing images file like with DeepSky Stacker?
I hope that all makes sense.

I did find some information/review that was based on Photoshop
They recommended the AMD Ryzen 9-5900HX

But still trying to work all this out at the moment.

DSS stacking is not the "same" as video editing.....but lets not go too far down that rabbit hole...

All the stacking or star image processing software that i am aware of uses the CPU heavily, and a lot of RAM.....so the faster cpu/more ram you have, the better. having a really fast NVME disk helps if you run into a lot of paging issues or copying to/from the lappie - but in terms of reading/writing image files in image processing is not really the bottleneck. On my desktop with a fancy GPU - the GPU is barely ticking over when image processing, so does not seem to play any part.

having said that....

A lot of shops will try to sell you too much RAM....
i "only" have 8G in mine, and flat out it only ever uses about 50% of that...

Suffice to say - the ryzen with 8 cores is going to be quick, and if you chuck 16G ram at it and a 4th gen NVME it will be quick for a while into the future....

Hope this advice helps - what a fast PC is, may mean different things to different people. For the small amount i spent on a lappie that was about to be thrown out.....mine is 'fast enough' !