Laptops for Vegas?
 

Hey I'm just getting ready to plunk down some serious laptop change, and I wanted to hear from some hard core vegas folks what they are using? (laptop-wise)

I love the look of Sony, but I'm ready for whatever gives me a wide screen, and lots of speed and ram. I'm also expecting to put an external drive or 2 on it - just for space. I need something that I can edit with while on the road.

Of course lots of ins and out

Thanks for your tips!

Milt Lee

I'm using a laptop from Earl Foote at PC Nirvana. I think you will find most laptops to be sufficient. However, you should really look for:

Fastest CPU you can afford
1 Gig or more of RAM
7200 RPM Hard drive (the bigger the better)
I have an external drive in a firewire case
Also check the FSB speed.

You could get by with 512MB? I don't see how someone could use all the extra RAM unless doing some pretty crazy RAM previews.

FSB speed (533 vs 800) and Hyperthreading make a few % difference in performance. They make a small measurable difference but you can easily do without them. HT seems to speed DVD encoding by around 15% (haven't tested this myself).

Sager makes some interesting high performance laptops (7200rpm internal drives, high end pentium or AMD64 CPU, 1680X1050 resolution). I don't have any experience with them however.

You could take a look at sager laptops at the sager website (http://www.sagernotebook.com/) or on http://www.go-l.com (go-l just rebrands them and puts their rock in it).

Yes, you *can* get by with 512 meg ram. However, ram is a fairly cheap component - why not go with 1 Gig? It will come in handy when doing ram previews or running multiple instances of Vegas or other programs in conjunction with Vegas.

But in reality, it can get by in 256 meg of ram. In fact - I still have one machine here that is running Vegas 5 just fine in 256 meg. But my newer (faster and most used) machine has 1 Gig!

I'm using a DELL Inspiron 9100 widescreen laptop:

- 1680 x 1050 res (you can choose an even higher res. model)
- Pentium 4 3.2 GHZ - Hyperthreading processor
- 1 GB RAM
- 80 GB harddisk
- DVD burner
- firewire / USB2

Only downside is weight and size. It is being made as a desktop
replacement not to carry around all day (which I don't).

I'm not familiar with the term FSB - what's that all about?

Thanks for the tips! I've got about 3K but if I can save a little here and there, I can get another mic (you can never have too many!)

Milt Lee

You should be able to get a laptop for far under 3K I think.

FSB = front side bus: communications channel between the CPU and other devices

Click here for Wikipedia explenation

FSB = front side bus.

Check out www.powernotebooks.com for a NP8790 widescreen notebook with a P4chip and second optional internal hard drive.

Read the resellerrating.com feedback on them. I almost ordered their notebook for Vegas editing before I elected to custom build a desktop machine. I'd buy a Sager from this company before I bought one from Sager itself.

Interesting article on this company's website about how almost all laptops are manufactured by just a few OEMs and then rebadged as Apple, Dell, etc. And we thought Bogen tripods were the only thing rebadged!

I use a Toshiba P25 S525. It's got a 3.0ghz P4 w/ 800mhz fsb. 512mgs ram, 80gig hd, DVD burner, built in wireless 802.11 wireless, and a sweet 17" 1440x900 WXGA screen...all for under around $1800. Let me tell you- the Vegas timeline looks beautiful spanned across that widescreen. I use it in conjunction with 2 Maxtor One-Touch 200gig external drives. That way I can continue to work on projects when I'm away from home on the weekends. It's great to watch movies on as well....the widescreen aspect ratio fills the screen.

http://www.toshibadirect.com/td/b2c/...7&ccid=1291021

Glen:

I knew from beggining you had a taste for good art. But now it's proved.

Milt:

I do own a Toshiba P25 as well, mine is a S509. I own it for almost one year, and I'm very happy. Had only to upgrade to 1GB of RAM Memory.

You can go wrong with P25's

You might check out DVLine here: http://www.dvline.com/site/products/laptops.cfm . They have some awesome stuff.
Randy

Sony PCG-GRT390ZP.
Expensive, but, worth every penny.

<<<-- Originally posted by Gustavo Nardelli : Glen:

I knew from beggining you had a taste for good art. But now it's proved.

Milt:

I do own a Toshiba P25 as well, mine is a S509. I own it for almost one year, and I'm very happy. Had only to upgrade to 1GB of RAM Memory.

You can go wrong with P25's -->>>

Hey, nice....how much did the upgrade cost? How did you do it- did you install the ram yourself. I think mine is two 256 chips. If I want to add an additional 512 I have to remove a 256 chip to make room....or is there an extra slot...I never looked. Thanks.

Glen ,my son has one of those great Toshibas, and earlier model with a 2.8ghz HT chip. He's made a very good living with it and Vegas. Just need an external firewire drive and a good set of pro quality headphones or earplugs and powerbooks have nothing on us.

Both CompUSA and BestBuy offer them. One note..
If you decide to purchase at either place, don't let them talk you into an extended warranty, not matter how hard they try. Not worth the money. Most major vendors offer their own extended warranty plan. And guess what, you can send in your pc just as easy as the bozo at the discount store can.

btw...HP has come out with their z7000 series as an answer to the Toshibas. Worth checking out