Hi all, this board looks great, so looking for opinions. Here's our workflow in a nutshell, will this laptop cut it?

1-Shoot with Sony XDCAM HD in SD (standard def DV25) for now.

2-Use Edius Broadcast to edit on Dell Precision M90 (specs below) in the field.

3-Export finished file over a LAN to a server, or FTP files back through internet.

M90 specs: Intel CoreDuo 1.83Ghz, 633MHZ bus I believe, 1GB RAM, and NVidia Quadro xd(?) 256MB, 80G HDD, 17" WXGA widescreen LCD

Edius specs for HDV list a dual core Intel 2.8GHZ, however we are a news station and don't plan on any serious effects besides a dissolve or wipe here and there. Possibly a face blur. Our stories won't be longer than 2 minutes long each file. Will this laptop cut it do you think? We'd of course love to use the same laptop for HD when we make our switchover or at least use it as a backup/spare.

Thanks in advance,
hr

If you're just editing DV then Edius should work fine on that laptop for true real-time editing with live output via firewire; you should be pleasantly surprised with what you can do. For HD editing I'd guess you should be able to handle one layer okay and possibly two, but it would be better to push the processor to 2+ GHz to prepare for that. Don't short-change a few bucks on the cost of the laptop and end up regretting it later.

I gather that the Core Duo processors are roughly equivalent to previous Intel dual-core processors running at significantly higher clock speeds, but even then it's going to be just barely enough for XDCAM HD editing. The next batch of "Core 2" processors due out in a few months are rumored to be much faster, so it might be worth waiting for those if you don't need the laptop just yet.