Time to upgrade laptop? Slow lightroom performance

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Name
Adam
Edit My Images
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Hi there

Wondered if anyone could provide any advice. Im finding that my Lightroom 6 software is quite slow and cumbersome to use. I have cleared some space off my hardrive by backing up hundreds of RAW files (quite scary how much these take up!)

While there has been improvement it still is fustrating to use and is really putting me off post processing my images.


I will admit my laptop is fairly entry level but I have provided some specs below:
ACER E15 ES1-512-C5YW
Processor: Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU N2840 @ 2.16 GHz 2.16 GHz
4.00 GB RAM (3.88 Useable)
x64 based processor 64bit Operating system
Intel HD Graphics
500BG HDD

Ive been advised that maybe upgrading to a solid state hard drive may improve performance but not significantly. Is there anything in particular that I may have overlooked to adjust on Lightroom or anything else here I could possibly upgrade that would help.

Thanks for any help.
 
There is no point trying to upgrade it.

The processor is truly awful. Looking at tests, I think the laptop I had 12 years ago was better. No joke
 
IMO a Notebook like the Acer is markedly underpowered to run LR or any editing software especially of raw files. LR requires horsepower of the processor and a Celeron is very low end plus as much RAM as you can throw at it.

You don't mention which Windows you are using and that will have its own demands. So better to put upgrade money into a more capable PC!
 
The Celeron processor was never designed for tasks such as post processing.
If you are going to buy a new laptop using the latest Intel 'i' series processor like the i5 and minimum of 8GB Ram.
SSD's are good but you will pay a premium price for higher capacity storage and as you know, RAW files take up quite a bit of storage.
If you decided to go with a laptop with a SSD, then also buy an external hard drive for storing your RAW files.
This is something you should already doing, if the hard drive in your laptop fails with a hardware fault you would lose the lot and specialist data recovery does not come cheap.
 
To answer the question in the title, yes, it's time to upgrade to a higher spec computer - there are no user-upgrades that you can make that will give the laptop an adequate speed improvement for processing.
 
As others have said that laptop is woefully under-powered for any sort of photo processing. I would say as a minimum you need to be looking at a Core i5 processor and 8GB of RAM. Lightroom does run better on machines with 12GB of RAM or more so the better. Also upgrading from LR6 to a Creative Cloud subscription will help, Adobe have worked hard on LR performance lately and it is noticeably better.
 
Wow im amazed ive managed to get this far with it! Its just about tolerable at the moment but it really does have good days and bad days. Sounds like i need something a lot more mid range. I didnt realise how heavy lightroom was on resources. I find having everything closed in the background helps somewhat

Thankfully i already back my images up on an external hard drive
 
Ads22 said:
Wow im amazed ive managed to get this far with it! Its just about tolerable at the moment but it really does have good days and bad days.
Click to expand...

I can process images on my 10 YO Macbook (2GHz core 2 duo processor) but performance is only just bearable from a fresh boot with nothing running in the background and providing one does not use either the brush or spot removal tools. And that's despite running SSD for storage & 8GB of RAM (performance is no different compared with 4GB TBH).
 
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