I have a dell studio 14 (old one) on the first generation i7 which I have upgraded to the intal 520 - 120GB ssd - Be careful of the sizing of the SSD inside your laptop as not all fits exactly.
The challenge i see with additional monitor is heat - that added when you process pictures, may just trigger the auto shutdown safe feature in the processor.
Happened to me a few times....
On the other note...
I manage to pull up 14GB of ram usage when I was crunching up a Pano tiff stitch of a few shots on the D800E
Now I am thinking if shooting uncompress raw can actually help performance.
if its not essential shooting, just casual, can just shoot and filter and delete.
Keeping only the keepers outside of ssd to Raid storage --
The challenge i see with additional monitor is heat - that added when you process pictures, may just trigger the auto shutdown safe feature in the processor.
Happened to me a few times....
On the other note...
I manage to pull up 14GB of ram usage when I was crunching up a Pano tiff stitch of a few shots on the D800E
Now I am thinking if shooting uncompress raw can actually help performance.
if its not essential shooting, just casual, can just shoot and filter and delete.
Keeping only the keepers outside of ssd to Raid storage --
My laptop is running a nVidia GT 420M with 1024 mb so I presume it's not a problem.
However the max ram supported by my laptop is 8 gb due to limitations of older i5 m processor. By the way I'm using the Dell XPS L501X with RGBLED screen.
As of now I have monitored the RAM usage and it has not exceeded 4.5 GB on my full screen LR4 work but preview loading and going to the next frame is laggy. As discussed I am plugging my Dell 2711 screen (2400 x 1600) to it, it is very fast on native resolution of 1920 x 1080.
I am now considering to upgrade to an Intel 240 GB SSD first them consider whether I will need to go or a full fledged desktop.