Laptop for graphic artist

Hello,

I'm looking at buying a laptop for my wife. She'll be using this laptop primarily for photo-editing tasks using photoshop. She does some video editing, but this is far from the laptops primary purpose.

The budget is in the $700-800 range.

The truth is that I've been completely out of the hardware loop for about two years, and I need some help boning up on what is a "good deal."

Also, I've noticed that most of the laptops come with puny 5400 RPM SATA drives. Do you know of any models than come with a 7200?

Thanks for the help guys, I appreciate any that you can give.

Edit: Monitor size should be 17" or larger.

Edit Edit: Why is my user name pink now?

What do you guys think about this one?

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produ...8UA_ABA_G72_B60US_17_3_Notebook_Computer.html

I buy Thinkpads or Macbooks, but they may be outside of your budget. Macbooks especially tend to have nice screens with good brightness and decent contrast, which would be very helpful for an artist, especially if she's doing photo editing. It's always a pain when photos look one way on a (crappy) monitor and then print entirely differently. I used to notice a pretty marked difference in the way photos looked on my Thinkpad and how they looked on my IPS monitors at my desktop.

I wouldn't buy an HP unless it's really well reviewed. They tend to have shoddy build quality except for a few specific models. The Elitebooks, for example, are supposed to be very good.

The Dell XPS 17 apparently has a decent screen, though not IPS: http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-l702x/pd.aspx Might be worth looking into.

Is she planning on taking it places? It would be much easier to get a great machine at that budget if it were a desktop...

Thanks johan, that is all very good advice. I was looking more into the HP reviews, and yeah, it looks like bad build quality is common.

She just rented a small studio, and she'd like to be able to work on her photos there and other places. She has a decent rig at the house, but now that she'll be working away from home more it would be better if she was mobile.

I'm looking more into the XPS line to make sure she'll be cool with it. We may just need to bump up the budget a little bit.

Thanks for the help

It's tough to find any good laptop with a 17" screen at that price point. You can sometimes snag some details on Thinkpads at the outlet: http://outlet.lenovo.com/laptops/thinkpad.html?screen_size=132&series=143 But most of those screens are fairly low quality.

You can also get refurbished MacBook Pros from Apple. The 17" probably won't fit your budget, but the 15" is closer: http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/specialdeals/mac/macbook_pro/15?mco=MjEwNzM3MzE