Is this a good laptop for Photoshop use?

[Old-N-Feeble]

Kirk... I agree with Preston regarding screen re-draws. You already know this but for those who might not: The VC... and bus speed or RAM speed for that matter... makes far less difference than amount of RAM and speed of the drive on which the swap (scratch) file is located but, for very large files, dual quad-core CPUs or a six-core is a must, IMO.

[John Rodriguez]

I'm currently using a 2009 Macbook with dual 2.13ghz Core 2 processors and 6GB of ram. I'm working on 600MB scans without too much trouble except for when I'm working with SmartObjects, then things slow to an absolute crawl. Long story short - it can be done with a less powerful machine with patience (guide file approach is helpful too when possible).

However, my next machine will have at least dual i7 Quadcores with 16GB of RAM and use a RAID 0 SSD scratch setup. With the advent of Thunderbolt you can have multiple drives connected to a laptop with serious speed, the only real limitation now is the 16GB RAM capacity.

Everything you need to know about what you want to aim for hardware-wise is here - http://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/...p-cs4-cs5.html