Looking for a new laptop, have some questions...

Todd1225

I'm looking to purchase my first laptop. Other than surfing the web, i'm looking to use the firewire port to encode video from my digital camcorder, and maybe play some slightly older games, and possibly some "emulation" gaming like MAME, Nesticle, etc.

I'm trying to decide if I want a dedicated video card, or one that borrows up to 64 MB from main memory. I planned on getting 512 MB of RAM anyway.

I'm also trying to decide if I need to upgrade to a 5400 RPM drive versus the standard 4200 that most laptops come with. Is this gonna affect encoding video from firewire?

Any help is appreciated!!

Webmaster

I bought a laptop for some of the same reasons 2 years ago. A Sony VAIO, 650MHZ, Intel Celeron. It came with a firewire connection which I needed for moving videos from my DV cam to my laptop. It has only 128 MB of which a certain amount is shared with the videocard. Anyway, it totally didn't work out. During capture of videos it would not correctly capture all frames, making the results terrible.

I would definitely go for one with dedicated vid mem, and the fastest HD type. Even on my 1,5 GHZ AMD Athlon desktop PC with 5400 RPM disks it didn't go very smooth all the time, 7200 was a major improvement.

Todd1225

Thanks Johan, the only laptop that I can purchase (and finance) with a 7200 rpm drive is a Dell Inspiron. The only problem with that is, it only comes in SXGA, I really dont' wanna look at 1400 X ??? all day long, plus that is just a weird resolution. Looks like a 64 MB dedicated and 5400 rpm is gonna be the best I can do.

Webmaster

I think that should work just fine, the problems on my laptop were mainly caused by lack of memory as well as video memory.

It also depends a lot on the software you use as well. I got some Pinnacle software with a PCI firewire card and it captured a lot more accurate than Windows Movie Maker. I got ArcSoft Showbiz with my DVD-writer which seems to be good, haven't used it much yet.

Also, make sure you create a seperate partition on the disk to hold captured video, don't put to many other files on it and be sure to keep it defragmented. And in the worst case you can often turn of the 'preview while capturing' to save system resources.

Todd1225

Yeah, I thought it was weird that Dell only offers a 7200 RPM drive in only two of it's models, other than that you get a 4200 RPM unit. I also found it odd that Sony touts their laptops with the ability to capture from DV, but I think those are 4200 rpm drives. The only laptop I could finance and configure with a 5400 rpm drive and decicated memory was a HP unit.