Laptop for backpacking

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Hi all,

Looking at heading out on a backpacking trip for 6-9 months.

I'd like to take a laptop with me with my main (most demanding use) being Lightroom. (I have a hard copy of LR5)
I will of course do the standard googling / watching films but thats pretty standard.

I have heard that not all laptops / chromebooks can run Lightroom - is this true?
Im guessing they lack the speed to run or have a awkward OS?

Apart from the criteria above, any suggestions must be windows (not Mac!), light and relatively small. (Circa 13' screen is fine, 15' too big)

Budget - will probably buy second hand so hard to say. I dont want to be buying a £700 new laptop thats for sure. Its going to be in a backpack and thrown around the hold of a bus!

A chromebook fits my needs perfectly but i dont think they can run LR :(
 
Hi Nick,
I have a Dell XPS 13 and it's now 3 years old and still working very well. I use it mainly for photography (Lightroom CC and Photoshop)... I bet you could find a used one for a good price (I suggest you a i7 with 16gb ram)
 
The XPS is a well built device - my XPS15 is now 5 years old and the same weight at the unibody Macbook 13 it replaced. Also consider a microsoft Surface of some description.
 
Chromebooks won't run Lightroom. You're stuck with a laptop running windows or a laptop running Mac OSX. You can install Windows on a MacBook if necessary - or a MS Surface tablet running a full version of windows.

If its going to be in a backpack and possibly subject to a few knocks and bumps, I'd prefer a slightly more robust machine than a cheaper one with more plastic than metal.
 
I had a Lenovo as my work laptop, rugged machine and they probably still do something similar
 
The ideal backpacking laptop has to be the Panasonic Toughbook. They are almost indestructable and you can find plenty of used ones on ebay for £100 up. You'd have to work out your minimum specification to support Lightroom and I suspect that might mean going for a much more expensive unit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toughbook
 
Dell XPS are the ultimate backpacking laptops but are very expensive, especially for an i7.
It may be worth getting an i5 used as that should be capable of doing everything i need.
I think an i7 would be too much risk to loose / get damaged too.
I plan on carry an external hard drive to store photos / films so i dont clog the laptop up.
I will also back photos up to the cloud.
 
You don't need an XPS. Get a used Dell Latitude 14" They are just as tough.

Also there are like 9 generations of i5 and i7 and multiple options in each generation so
you cant just go on if it is i5 or i7.

Use cpubenchmark website and look up the CPU score there.
You want something that scores over 6000 these days for photo editing with modern cameras.
Plus 16GB RAM if you can afford it.

There are loads of eco friendly low power rubbish around these days in laptops and you should avoid them for photo editing.
You want high performance not high efficiency low power.
 
An XPS is lightweight - that may be a consideration - while a Lattitude generally isn't.

Absolutely aggree with the rest of Caerus' post, especially the bit about low-power laptops. I recently bought a Linx 12" tablet running W10 for use as a music score display, a task it performs a little grudgingly. However running On1 Photoraw on it is not terribly rewarding, and a lot of patience is required for what is otherwise a snappy piece of software with a 2.3GHz i7 quad and 16GB RAM.
 
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