Wrapping up my transition from the desktop PC to a laptop PC for photo editing today.

The big task has been to get the hard drives attached and configured to the new 5 bay docking station. Doing the final tweaks to that this morning. Optimizing & defragging the the disks as I write this. My actual calculated final disk space available to the laptop when docked is just a hair over 19 Terabytes. Those disks contain my master Lightroom catalogs and all my original images since time began, and swappable hard drives for doing backups of everything on the system. Right now I have 13 disk drives full of archives, which include everything I’ve ever done on the computers since 2005. I can swap those disk drives in and out of the docking bay on a moments notice and retrieve any image or file I’ve misplaced. I’ve learned about keeping good backups the hard way over the years. It doesn’t pay to neglect your backups.

My docked laptop is a 3 monitor setup, including the monitor built into the laptop. All have been color calibrated and adjusted to look virtually identical. I don’t use the laptop monitor docked though, as I keep the case lid closed and rely on the two desktop monitors for my day to day photo editing and office work. One of these days I’ll pick up a pair of matched, high resolution monitors for that purpose, but for now, it’s all my budget can handle.

For software, I’m using LibreOffice for word processing and spreadsheets. Firefox for a browser, Adobe Creative Cloud and DXO Photo Lab for photo editing, Display Cal for monitor calibration, Thunderbird for email, Garmin Express and Garmin Base Camp for my GPS receivers, and Corel Video Studio Elite for movie editing.

The laptop is a Dell XPS-17 with a 10th generation Intel i9 Core cpu/motherboard, 64 gigabyte DDR memory, Nvida GeForce RTX 2060 3D graphics card with 16 gigs of graphics memory, along with a 2 Terabyte SSD system boot drive containing a Windows 10 Pro operating system.

There are a few other little oddball things loaded and connected to the system, which will allow me to work seamlessly either at home or on the road.

For image backups on the road, I have a SanDisk 1 terabyte SSD plus connected to a Thunderbolt adapter, so I can back all my photos and video’s up while away from the office.

Now, if this don’t get it done, I’m shit out of luck.