New laptop advice

hdl

I'm looking for a new laptop, and hoping for some advice on what to look for in it. Main uses would be Photoshop, Lightroom, some web browsing and a small amount of Word/Excel use.

My old laptop had an i5-2410m processor, 6gb ram and a GeForce gt525m card. Don't have a great budget, trying to keep it under 550. Have been looking at laptops with 8gb of ram, not fussed about hard disk size, but price-wise, everything in my budget seems to have an AMD processor. I've never used a laptop with one before. Are they comparable, or should I really be looking for an Intel? And in terms of graphics cards, could I get away with integrated, or should I be looking for dedicated graphics?

Thanks for any help you can offer.

Alanstrainor

Stick with Intel would be my advice. There should be tonnes of machines in that price range with Intel chips.

As for integrated vs dedicated graphics, I think your budget will be the biggest deciding factor. That being said, I wouldn't expect this to matter much for your usage.

hdl

Thanks for your input, that really helps. I think Photoshop requires a min of 2ghz in a processor, and from what I've looked at online, that limits me to an i5 or some of the i3s I think. Good to hear I don't need to worry about the graphics card. I may start looking into desktops too! Thanks again.

Alanstrainor

These are the requirements:

Windows

Intel® Pentium® 4 or AMD Athlon® 64 processor (2 GHz or faster)
Microsoft® Windows® 7 with Service Pack 1, Windows 8, or Windows 8.1
2 GB of RAM (8 GB recommended)
2 GB of available hard-disk space for installation; additional free space required during nstallation (cannot install on removable flash storage devices)
1024x768 display (1280x800 recommended) with 16-bit color and 512 MB of VRAM (1 GB recommended)**
OpenGL 2.0–capable system
Internet connection and registration are necessary for required software activation, validation of subscriptions, and access to online services.*

I would not worry about that saying 2Ghz. It's referring to a Pentium 4 chip which are long out of existence. I run photoshop and lightroom on low spec systems and dont have issues.

hdl

Thanks very much for your help, I appreciate it.