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#1 |
New Boot
Join Date: Aug 2002
Posts: 21
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Laptop
Hi
I'm about to buy a laptop and was wondering if anyone had any advice regarding them. I'm thinking of purchasing a Advent 7017 which has a P4 2.8Mhz, 512 DDR Ram and a 40 Gig HDD. It comes with Windows XP home edition included. I use Premiere 6, Photoshop 7 and After Effect 5.5 alot. And I have a Canon XL1s. I was also wondering about the use of a external fire wire HDD. Any information and advice will be greatly apreciated. Thank you Llewellyn Thomas |
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#2 |
Regular Crew
Join Date: Jan 2003
Location: Forest Grove, OR
Posts: 122
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Make sure the laptop model you're looking at has a FireWire port. A lot of laptops do not.
I suggest Windows XP Pro, not Home. I suggest also comparing the new Pentium M "Centrino" based laptops, they look nice. Alienware also makes a nice high end laptop. Cheers [bac] |
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#3 |
Trustee
Join Date: Oct 2001
Location: Chigasaki, Japan.
Posts: 1,660
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I also would suggest the use of XP Pro or even Win2k. The reason is both these OS's allow more flexibility in the file system. This will help you increase the realibility, useability and performance of your machine.
The basic specs of the machine you mentioned are more than enough for DV editing. I use all the apps you mentioned on my Dell Inspirion 3800 which only has a PIII 700 and 256MB of RAM. An external firewire drive is not a must but it is definately a good idea. It allows you to keep your video files seperate from your OS/apps with will again benefit reliability, useability and performance. If you decide against the ext FW drive, besure to partition your HDD. Store all of your OS/App files on C: and the video files on a seperate partition. I also recommend setting up a third partition as your swap(page) file. Make this partition 3x the amount of RAM installed (ie for 512MB make the partition 1550MB and allocate 1536 to the swap file. Again, with a Windows machine this will help improve the reliability, useability and performance of your machine.
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#4 |
Moderator
Join Date: Mar 2002
Location: Boston, MA (travel frequently)
Posts: 837
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Are there any PC laptops that offer 6-pin FireWire ports rather than just 4-pin? My HP laptop has 4-pin FW, which is a bit limited in that it does not support powering any FW devices via the FW port, meaning that each FW device needs to be self-powered via an external power adaptor. This is annoying at times, especially when you want to be free of AC adaptors.
- don
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#5 |
Regular Crew
Join Date: Jan 2003
Location: Forest Grove, OR
Posts: 122
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I have yet to find a PC laptop w/ a 6 pin 1394 connector. There may have been a Dell laptop that did, at one point, but I don't think their new systems do.
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#6 |
Major Player
Join Date: Mar 2003
Location: Vallejo, CA
Posts: 263
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I'm with thte consensus on this board. Stay clear away from home, it is like a bad joke. A crippled OS.
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#7 |
Inner Circle
Join Date: Jul 2002
Location: Centreville Va
Posts: 1,828
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The hot one right now is the Sony Viao GVX680. At Brandsmart they have it at around 2300.
Has.... 16inch screen ATI 9000 video with 64megs of ram Pentium 2.8ghz 512 DDR ram 60 gig HD dual format DVD writer (+ and - support). USB 2 and I.link(1394 aka firewire, Sony calls it i.link) built in Ethernet. Memory expandable to 1gig lots of other options. Multimedia software. this thing has Vegas 4 written all over it,hehehe. Basically a 'DeskNote', uses the desktop PIV. Vera vera cooooool. |
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#8 |
RED Code Chef
Join Date: Oct 2001
Location: Holland
Posts: 12,514
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I don't know of a laptop with 6-pin firewire either. My DELL has
4-pin connector.
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#9 |
Regular Crew
Join Date: Mar 2003
Location: Surprise, AZ
Posts: 144
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I was in the same boat as you Llewellyn, I bought a Sony Viao that rocked, but it was missing a few things that I needed, USB 2.0, XP Pro, and duel battery suport without losing the cd-rom drive. I returned it and bought a dell. It had everything I needed and then some. Plus it was cheaper. I bought an external hard drive. It uses firewire and USB 2.0. Like said earlier, no laptops come with 6 pin firewire ports due to the power issues, thats why I went with the duel and why my laptop needs USB 2.0. I use firewire at home and USB on my laptop. Works great. Almost as fast as firewire and at times faster it is self powered. I went with the Storix Fusion HDD. ITs great. As small as a wallet and doesn't require external power. As for the laptop. Most websites with have all the specs for their machines. Read over them carefully. Just make sure it has the firewire. That's a must.
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#10 |
Warden
Join Date: Mar 2002
Location: Clearwater, FL
Posts: 8,287
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Just as a point of reference and not meant to start a platform war, Apple Powerbooks use 6 pin FireWire.
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#11 |
Regular Crew
Join Date: Mar 2003
Location: Surprise, AZ
Posts: 144
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Holy shit your right!!! I forgot about that. Good call Jeff.
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