Generally in photoediting, there are two frequent causes of delays. Processing and harddisk delays. Processing delays happen when you do an computationally intensive operation on a large picture. These delays do not happen very frequently for basic editing work, like colour/exposure/crop/rotate operations. Loading delays on the other hand are very frequent. They happen when you load or save, when the OS or application hits the swap files, when temp files are used, when browsing huge numbers of pictures, etc. For this reasons, laptops are inherently poorer choices for dedicated photo editing. The 2.5" laptop harddisk is no fight for its 3.5" cousin, in transfer speeds, access time, capacity and price. The difference is very significant, so you might want to factor this in before plonking your hard earned money down on a lappy. You can get a SSD for your laptop; it is faster, but it costs a lot more and will fill up very quickly.