Suggestion on how to handle Vegas 11 from my laptop

[Marcus Martell]

Hola i'm using Vegas for a while on a Dell m6300 PRECISION laptop with FX3600 Nvidia Quadro card.
Running XP 32 bit on an Xtreme X9000 processor, i have 4 GB of Ram.
To obtain all the improvements of Vegas 11 how would you handle my Dell?
Should i go for WINDOWS7? Should i partitionate the hard disc?
I need your suggestions

thanks a lot

[Adam Stanislav]

Originally Posted by Marcus Martell

Should i go for WINDOWS7?

Yes. VP 11 does not support XP. And I would go for the 64-bit version of Windows 7. But make sure you can get whatever drivers are Dell specific. Laptops sometimes can only use vendor specific drivers for certain devices, such as the video card. So don’t do anything without talking to someone at Dell. Not just a tech support person who reads from a script but a an actual tech who knows what he is talking about.

Also make sure to back up everything and to create a restore disc, just in case you need to go back!

Originally Posted by Marcus Martell

Should i partitionate the hard disc?

No. It gives you no advantage in Windows 7 and it lowers the total size of storage bytes available.

[Jeff Harper]

Rather than spend money on Windows 7, I would consider a newer laptop if possible with Windows 7 installed. If that is not possible, than if it were me I'd stick with XP and the older Vegas, I think. That would be a tough call, I guess.

[Wendy Sarrett]

Definitely ditch xp for Windows 7. Given your laptop only has 4gb of ram and from what I have read/head you want *a lot* of ram for a demanding program like Vegas, I agree it is probably time for an upgrade to a new laptop or at the very least add memory to the one you have now. I assume you need the portability for your editing system...if not you might also consider putting together a big tower machine for your editing. Hope this helps.

[Marcus Martell]

Guys maybe i'm out of times but my Precision M6300 was the top 2 years ago from Dell's laptop.
My render with m2t files are fast enough; and i don't think it's time to change machine.....
I need portability and for that reason i was going on a laptop.
Where would i find the advantages of adding RAM to my pc for VEGAS?
Right now i can only use 2 GB cause of XP 32 limitations.
Please let me know

thx

[Ian Stark]

I think the key message here is that you cannot use XP for v11 so it MUST be upgraded. By going to Win 7/64 you can use all your 4GB.

I happily ran Vegas 10 with 4GB for a long time, then recently doubled that (by replacing the whole lot, not just adding another 4) and the performance increase was quite noticeable. It wasn't spectacular, but it justified the cost of the extra RAM.

My experience with mobile editing was that I hit the limits of performance a lot sooner than I did with a high spec (and cheaper) desktop. In other words, there's only so far you can go to upgrade the laptop, whereas you can go SOOO much further with a desktop.

If you need to be mobile, though, then end of dicussion, you need to be mobile!

Do the upgrade to Win7/64. See if that meets your needs, performance-wise, then if not try adding more RAM.

[Jeff Harper]

Ian's points are good, of course. But my opinion is that you will spend, what, about $200 or more a new OS and Ram, correct?

I think it will give you a pretty small increase in performance, and that the money spend should've been spent on a newer laptop.

When you make the investment in the upgrade I think you'll be disappointed enough that you wish you hadn't bothered. I could be wrong.

All the new laptops come with Windows 7 64 bit anyway, so I think the money would just be better spent.

More ram will not hurt you, but keep in mind Windows XP is a faster OS than Windows 7, so Windows 7 itself is not an improvement speed wise. Secondly, your machine was not built to Windows 7 specs, so yes it might be a nice little laptop, but two years ago for a laptop is as good a 5 years on a desktop, kind of what Ian says.

Two years ago, the fastest laptops were already using Windows 7, so your laptop might have been good then, but it was already borderline older model. If you didn't get Windows 7 two years ago, you got an older model on sale, I'm guessing, and you bought it on clearance right after Windows 7 came out, I'm guessing. So your hardware is the issue, not so much the OS.

[Ian Stark]

Fair points, Jeff. I know only too well the dissapointment of upgrading to relatively little effect :-(

Personally I would need to spend a REAL fortune on getting a laptop that would give me the kind of performance I want. I'm working on a complicated project now that is pushing my outrageous new hexacore desktop to it's limits. I would be tearing my hair out on a laptop!

[Jeff Harper]

Yeah, Ian, early in my PC career I tried polishing up my OEM pcs, with virtually no success.

The biggest improvements to an OEM model usually happen with a faster hard drive and maybe more ram, but with the same processor you are really stuck with yesterday's technology. It's such a waste of money. Upgrades to a custom build are different, you just replace the motherboard and processor, and you've got the newest.

I spent $1000 or more on a new processor and motherboard last month, and it is already outdated. It was a bad purchase, the dumbest PC expenditure I've ever made. $1000. That's a lot of money.

So yes, Marcus, you can say it was great two years ago, but that was two years ago. When Windows 8 comes out, the only way to take full advantage of it will be to buy the newest processor, which means I kind of threw away $1000 last month. So you can't really complain. I don't know what you spent, but you've probably got your money's worth out of it.

I just wouldn't waste money on an OS that you cannot transfer to another machine or on ram and put it on a machine built for XP, doesn't make sense to me.

[Marcus Martell]

Uhmmmm
i'm trying to get your point fellaz!

So the EXTREME X9000 is pre-history nowaday right? I'm kinda out of the CPU-OS late news and just trying to clarify what would be my best choice!
Thx my friends

[Jeff Harper]

I can't recommend a CPU for mobile, sorry. But I recommend to see what is about to come out, there very well may be a new mobile processor about to be released.

I personally like to buy the absolute fastest and newest, because it will last me longer. It costs more, true. But my last processor lasted me a long time, and was almost as fast as my current $800 processor when overclocked. I bought very wisely when I bought my old processor, I bought stupidly when I bought my current one. In my defense, I had read the new ones weren't coming out till Q2 2012. The announcement for the newer ones came out about the same time I bought my new one, so it was just very bad timing.

[Jeff Harper]

You can't go wrong with Aleinware, but they are pricey. And again, is the processor new or old? I have no idea.

http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/alienware-m17x-r3/pd

[Dave Blackhurst]

You won't get a fast spec'd laptop for anything CLOSE to $200... apples and oranges, add several crates or more like a truckload of oranges to get a "new" top spec machine...


I don't know your specs offhand (presuming an "Extreme" processor is pretty fast <G>) Marcus, but if it were me, I'd go look for the "family pack" Windows 7 - it gives you 3 home premium installs, either 32 OR 64 bit versions (you shoud go 64), for around $125, IF you can find it. Now you've "opened up" the RAM use and the 64bit - that might well help your machine feel a lot zippier.

I don't know the new VP11 features well enough to know whether you'd get a boost on that video card (CUDA). I've got a little 14" sitting here that I picked up (oddly enough for a little over $200 used), and the video says it has the CUDA extensions - I'm almost ready to pop for the V11 upgrade just to see if it will run on this thing...

Depending on what spec RAM you need and how many sockets you've got, it might be a good cheap upgrade to add another 4G, or replace what you've got to step up to 8G total I think you will "feel" the difference, though not as much from 2G to 4G.

Final thing is what HDD you've got - I picked up a little Alienware M11x used, and it was glacial... up until I put a Seagate Momentus 7200 drive in it (and tried both 4 and 8G RAM configs - there's a slight difference with 8, but I could feel it), The Hitiachi drive it came with may have been "good" a year or so ago when that particular computer was ordered, but it was a MASSIVE bottleneck, making the machine seem like a real turd. Got a real bargain on it, probably because the seller wasn't too thrilled with the performance and let it just sit.... a little tweaking, and it's quite zippy!

I've been setting up a couple small laptops for general use, so I've been experimenting with where you can make some gains for little pain - and you CAN get performance gains, sometimes for cheap.


Way I see it, if you find the "3 pack", install W7, you don't lose or waste anything... double check the HDD, and update it if needed - Dell has WD Scorpio Black (7200) 320G for around $60 when I was poking around their site, decent spec'd drive. Then if you're "close" to the desired performance, or can do it cheap (the SODIMMs I got were under $60 for the 8G pair), bump the RAM.

[Marcus Martell]

Interesting....
Now i'm writing back from my cell phone but a curiosity pops up:
How much would be to upgrade to 8gb RAM?