Afternoon all. The wife is thinking of purchasing this laptop from the Sony shop in the Square.

Vaio : VGN-CR31Z/N : Ireland

The laptop will not be used for any kind of serious gaming but herself does a lot of photo-shopping as her main hobby. She gets old photos and tries to enhance them and generally manipulate them just as a past time not in any way as a job.

Now the thing is she has a very good Digital camera and has become very critical, I say fussy, about quality.


The above laptop has a ATI® Mobility Radeon™ X2300 graphics card. Is this card good enough for the tasks she has in mind for it. Would it be easy to add a graphics card to a laptop if needed?


The lappy comes with 2 Gig of ram and Vista. Now the salesman says a feature of Vista operating system is that if you add a memory stick this would act/behave as more ram. I find that hard to believe, so I'm just checking with you other vista users.


Any comments ideas would be appreciated

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looking at the specs that laptop will easily match your wifes requirements. The graphics card is very good way more then what photoshop would need my laptop has 1g of ram a 256 graphics card and 1.86Gz core duo processor and runs photoshop perfect so she will have no problems.

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Controlled Aggression

Hi Wipsy,

Its probably more powerful than you'll need for Photo Editing and the like depending on the type of effects you are adding.

You'd probably get away with a laptop that costs less than a 1,000 Euro for most photo editing. Its only applying some filters that really takes a long time I find.

It comes with the below software installed. I have this installed on my laptop and I found it to have a lot of features I wouldn't have expected to see in software that comes preinstalled on a computer.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 6


Regarding the memory comment by the sales guy. I think Vista does have this feature but its not much use. Not as good as actual ram however the machine has enough ram to handle Vista anyway so its all good.

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Magic, fellows thanks for the quick replies. She has Elements 6, and she uses filters and multiple layers with it. It has become a really big thing with her.


She started with elements 4 and has upgraded every time a new one came out.

We have an old copy of Photoshop cs something or other her brother gave her but its much too complicated for our use.


Photoshop Elements does the job perfectly. I'm surprised the ram thing was true.

Again thanks, and she likes the "look" and "feel" of this machine so I suppose its looks like it will get a new home. Maybe if I'm nice to her she might get me one as well

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If she started to get her hands on CS3 then the laptop will struggle as it's a resource hog. I can get that laptop for €300-400 cheaper

From what I hear if you really want to get into photo editing then you need a mac. But any laptop should be grand. the one I speced will be used for more or less the same as your wife

I've been using my 3 year old laptop for it for the last couple of months and bar the loading time for Photoshop to load it handles it ok.

I wouldn't be to worried about the Graphics card. From what i understand about media editing that with general picture editing the graphics card wouldn't come into play too much. But some of the better tech heads here might advise ya better

And another note. Does it have to be sony? you could probably pick up a different brand laptop with the same specs for a bit less then the sony equivalent

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Criticalmass Enterprise
G-String Gamer

I think Sony make good quality screens so since its going to be for photo editing, its not a bad choice.

Sony look good too so that's a plus

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Two things, @ fuzzy, yes please. @stok, Stok she has her heart kinda set on Sony cause its "cute". She had a look on Dell but wants to be able to actually hold the machine.


A bigger factor probably is that she has a voucher as a Christmas bonus from her job, and the sony shop is one of the places that accept it.


No one really see's any probs with it so thats a good sign. I let you know what she decides.

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I agree with ya on all those points and the only problems I have with sony is there price tags

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Criticalmass Enterprise
G-String Gamer

and thats why you recommended a mac?

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