Hey all, I just finished up a commercial for cable TV done entirely on my new laptop, a Dell Inspiron 8600. The laptop was able to handle everything, from video editing the raw footage with Vegas 4 to DVD burning with DVD-A, to voiceover recording and editing with ProTools LE/Mbox. Because it is only a 30 sec commercial with only ~30 minutes of raw footage, I was able to use the internal hard drive, with no problems.

It has a (unpowered) Firewire port which should be fine for loading footage or hooking up to an external drive.

The only thing I couldn't do was preview raw footage stored on another computer effectively over a wireless network connection, but I did not really expect to be able to do that.

I've been doing editing on my DELL Latitude some while now,
works well. The reason why the wireless link is not doing so well
is because you are running at a maximum (which you'll probably
ain't getting) of 11 mbps. DV is 25 mbps so that will not work.
I'd say you will at least need a 30 mbps network with nothing
else going on for it to work.

I did some capture sessions a while back over my 100 mbps
network which worked okay.

I have 802.11G, and I can get 54 Mbps when I'm in the front room (near the wireless router). However, when I tried previewing some remote footage, I was in the back room ... I don't think I can get as high a transfer rate back there.

But if I'm in the front room, I might as well use my desktop system !

Your software should be able to let you view the current datarate
available to you at any point. See what it is in the backroom. It
might also be that your latency is just too high or other things
interferring.

I think it depends on the weather ;)

Sometimes it says 11 Mbps, sometimes 35 (?) or 20 (?) (not sure of the exact values).

Wireless internet is awesome, in any case.