Hi folks,
Looking to upgrade my laptop (6 yr old running Windows 7), primarily as the old one is very slow at processing my photos. I take quite a lot of photos, which means editing them. I don't major on post-editing, just make minor tweaks in the inbuilt Windows Live Photo Gallery - tweak exposure and saturation small amounts, adjust highlights/shadows sometimes, small sharpness adjustment, cropping. This is now taking ages to load/save each image on the current laptop, meaning that working through photos is now so tedious I avoid bothering to even take them. I've previously used GIMP but as I wasn't doing anything more than the above, stopped as it was even slower.
I want to start using RAW so bigger files, and may soon have some spare time to learn a bit more about photo editing generally, and so wish to upgrade laptop and consider software.
Other than photography, its just standard web browsing, occasional Excel/Word work.
If not on Wifi, normally used with a mobile dongle, not that this particularly matters I think.
Needs to be a laptop, gets used on the go a lot. Needs to have numeric pad built in and 15".
May get used for small video edits too, but not currently in my plans.
It is possible that I'd like to get a bit more serious with my writing and photography, so want to ensure the new set up is going to be up to this for a few years.
Considering a Dell Inspiron 15 5000 series with i7, 8gb RAM, 1TB hard drive, as it seems from reading up on the interweb that this should be able to handle my needs fairly easily.
Do these specs seem reasonable to folks? Any other brands/models offering close to the value this will be, with a current 12% offer on Dell making it about £641, but only for another day or so.
What software would you recommend for photo editing for someone like myself? Was thinking Lightroom, though somewhat sceptical about the whole Creative Cloud thing, just wanted to buy some software off the shelf really, not to subscribe. Could also go back to GIMP, but always found this a bit hard work. Any other recommendations?
My photography is mostly landscapes when walking or especially canoeing, you can see some in my gallery;
https://www.ukhillwalking.com/photos/author.html?id=11256.
Camera is a Canon 700D, which is excellent for my needs, supplemented with a waterproof Olympus TG2.
I use photos to tell stories in blogs/reports on various forums etc, so there are a ridiculous amount of other photos on my Flickr page which I link to;
https://www.flickr.com/photos/77080486@N05/sets/. I intend to start my own blog if I ever get round to it too...
It would be great to hear others' thoughts, and whether I'm heading in the right direction, particularly with the spec of the laptop - processor and RAM etc.
Many thanks in advance!
P.S. Am I going to hate Windows 10?