Hardware & software for processing?

[Kendahl]

My nine year old laptop (32 bit Vista and 310 GB hard drive) is good enough for image acquisition but not for processing with modern software like StarTools. Because it takes up less space, I prefer a laptop even though a desktop would be cheaper and its processor would have more cores. Would something with these minimum specifications be adequate?

• 17 inch screen with 1920 x 1080 resolution
  i7 processor
  16 GB RAM
  1 TB hard drive
  256 GB solid state drive

What would be a good choice for preprocessing software to apply darks, flats and dark flats to my lights, debayer and stack them? I have been using Nebulosity 3 which uses only two user selected stars for alignment. Deep Sky Stacker has been around for a long time. Astro Pixel Processor has received favorable comments. A program called Siril has also been mentioned.

[Burly]

My nine year old laptop (32 bit Vista and 310 GB hard drive) is good enough for image acquisition but not for processing with modern software like StarTools. Because it takes up less space, I prefer a laptop even though a desktop would be cheaper and its processor would have more cores. Would something with these minimum specifications be adequate?

• 17 inch screen with 1920 x 1080 resolution
  i7 processor
  16 GB RAM
  1 TB hard drive
  256 GB solid state drive

What would be a good choice for preprocessing software to apply darks, flats and dark flats to my lights, debayer and stack them? I have been using Nebulosity 3 which uses only two user selected stars for alignment. Deep Sky Stacker has been around for a long time. Astro Pixel Processor has received favorable comments. A program called Siril has also been mentioned.

Thats more than adequate the i7 will crunch through data like there`s no tomorrow ,make sure o/s is on the SSD ,just use 1TB for archiving everything ,it will boot up in like 4 seconds