CS5.5 on a small laptop - Dell Alienware M11x

[Charles W. Hull]

Why? I wanted a very small easy to carry laptop to backup my clips when I travel, good battery life and enough computing power to play PP CS5.5 (not with a big stack of layers and effects, but enough to string a story together before I get home to a larger machine).

What? I ended up with a Dell Alienware M11x gaming computer (and I took off the gaming stuff). It has a low voltage 1.5GHz i7, 6GB ram, a 2GB NVIDIA GT540M, and a 750GB disk. Battery life is about 7 hours. This is obviously not up to spec for a high performance editing machine, but I was anxious to see what it would do.

Alienware M11x Gaming Laptop Details | Dell

My cameras are a Canon 5DII and a Canon XF100. The Canon utilities for both cameras run beautifully, and I can download and review 1080p clips smoothly. The 5DII clips play on Media Player or ZoomBrowser and the XF100 clips play on the Canon utility.

I loaded CS5.5 Production Premium, and added the GT540M to the GPU list. Premiere Pro plays amazingly well. I can stack two 1080p clips with effects and still scrub and play smoothly. It typically stalls with three clips - so it's not a Mercury engine powerhouse - but I don't stack clips in the field anyway.

When I travel I've taken a HDMI cable to use the hotel TV as a big monitor to get a larger look at what I've shot. While I like very small laptops, for many the M11x may be too small. But Alienware also makes systems up to 18 inch that could be worth looking at.

[Greg Clark]

Charles I am interested in this tiny notebook. How is holding up editing CS5.5?

[Charles W. Hull]

Originally Posted by Greg Clark

Charles I am interested in this tiny notebook. How is holding up editing CS5.5?

Greg, it's doing fine. I've had it on several trips, and just got back from a three week trip. It does exactly what I had in mind - I back up clips, and string together and view storiy lines with PPro. I also use a WD Passport 1TB USB 3.0 drive to double-back-up the clips.