Teacher forced to use school laptop vs my own. What should I ask for?

[brobson]

is a HP i7 processor, 16GB RAM, and a 512GB SSD drive big enough for photoshop?

 

[maflynn]

The i7 should be ok but what generation? I’d double the Ram and get 1tb minimum

 

[rm5]

That's definitely good enough to run Photoshop, I've run it on much worse hardware. If you don't do anything super crazy, it should work fine. But exporting hundreds of RAW images, for example, might be pretty slow.

EDIT: As @maflynn points out, upgrading to 32 GB might be beneficial, but does that option even exist?

 

[brobson]

Thank you, Is WD Passport the portable drive to use to have files from both mac and windows? I am not sure how to make it so that I can back up from both. Anyone know?

 

[TheOtherAndy]

The i7 should be ok but what generation? I’d double the Ram and get 1tb minimum

With those specs? Probably a 6th gen at the very earliest, likely newer given the upcoming Windows 11 wall.

 

[InvertedGoldfish]

Should be plenty, obviously presume anything you do on that computer is being monitored

 

[rm5]

Thank you, Is WD Passport the portable drive to use to have files from both mac and windows? I am not sure how to make it so that I can back up from both. Anyone know?

Format the drive as ExFAT, so it can be read by both machines. However, you'd only be able to store files—you couldn't do full system backups.