laptop for costume design

Before you make any decision, there is a very important question to be answered: How important is the portability for your friend? If she wants to carry the laptop everywhere and very frequently, you definitely should recommend her a very light laptop unless she will really have a very hard life. And light laptops with good performance are not cheap. They are more than 800 USD. For a designer the following check points are very important practically: 1- A large screen is a must. 15" or more. Note: bigger screen = more expensive and more weight! 2- High capacity hard drive. However, these days no laptop is shipped with less than 80G hard drive which is the minimum she needs. Think about more, 120G maybe. 3- Fast CPU. Photoshop and 3ds Max use alot of process. Go for a Intel Core 2 Duo rather than AMD. 4- Alot of memory. Graphics programs eat memory. 1G is not alot for her! 2G or more. (more memory = more expensive) 5- DVD writer. She definitely needs this. 6- Good video card with at least 256M not-shared memory. Remember : "not-shared". This is very important. it boosts the performance alot. New ATI or nVidia cards are mostly good for a designer if they have enough memory. To find a laptop that satisfies these requirements and stays around 800USD you have probably search abit but you can use these website : http://www.newegg.com/ http://www.cnet.com have fun

you should try tell him to use acer 4520, it use amd turion x2 based, and also its pretty cheap, than the rest of the budget can be spend on more ram or more HD or changing the HD speed rotation to the fastest ones.