Hi

I'm about to buy a laptop and was wondering if anyone had any advice regarding them.

I'm thinking of purchasing a Advent 7017
which has a P4 2.8Mhz, 512 DDR Ram and a 40 Gig HDD.

It comes with Windows XP home edition included.

I use Premiere 6, Photoshop 7 and After Effect 5.5 alot.

And I have a Canon XL1s.

I was also wondering about the use of a external fire wire HDD.

Any information and advice will be greatly apreciated.

Thank you

Llewellyn Thomas

Make sure the laptop model you're looking at has a FireWire port. A lot of laptops do not.

I suggest Windows XP Pro, not Home.

I suggest also comparing the new Pentium M "Centrino" based laptops, they look nice.

Alienware also makes a nice high end laptop.

Cheers
[bac]

I also would suggest the use of XP Pro or even Win2k. The reason is both these OS's allow more flexibility in the file system. This will help you increase the realibility, useability and performance of your machine.

The basic specs of the machine you mentioned are more than enough for DV editing. I use all the apps you mentioned on my Dell Inspirion 3800 which only has a PIII 700 and 256MB of RAM. An external firewire drive is not a must but it is definately a good idea. It allows you to keep your video files seperate from your OS/apps with will again benefit reliability, useability and performance.

If you decide against the ext FW drive, besure to partition your HDD. Store all of your OS/App files on C: and the video files on a seperate partition. I also recommend setting up a third partition as your swap(page) file. Make this partition 3x the amount of RAM installed (ie for 512MB make the partition 1550MB and allocate 1536 to the swap file. Again, with a Windows machine this will help improve the reliability, useability and performance of your machine.

Are there any PC laptops that offer 6-pin FireWire ports rather than just 4-pin? My HP laptop has 4-pin FW, which is a bit limited in that it does not support powering any FW devices via the FW port, meaning that each FW device needs to be self-powered via an external power adaptor. This is annoying at times, especially when you want to be free of AC adaptors.

- don

I have yet to find a PC laptop w/ a 6 pin 1394 connector. There may have been a Dell laptop that did, at one point, but I don't think their new systems do.

I'm with thte consensus on this board. Stay clear away from home, it is like a bad joke. A crippled OS.

The hot one right now is the Sony Viao GVX680. At Brandsmart they have it at around 2300.

Has....
16inch screen
ATI 9000 video with 64megs of ram
Pentium 2.8ghz
512 DDR ram
60 gig HD
dual format DVD writer (+ and - support).
USB 2 and I.link(1394 aka firewire, Sony calls it i.link)
built in Ethernet.
Memory expandable to 1gig
lots of other options.
Multimedia software.

this thing has Vegas 4 written all over it,hehehe.

Basically a 'DeskNote', uses the desktop PIV.

Vera vera cooooool.

I don't know of a laptop with 6-pin firewire either. My DELL has
4-pin connector.

I was in the same boat as you Llewellyn, I bought a Sony Viao that rocked, but it was missing a few things that I needed, USB 2.0, XP Pro, and duel battery suport without losing the cd-rom drive. I returned it and bought a dell. It had everything I needed and then some. Plus it was cheaper. I bought an external hard drive. It uses firewire and USB 2.0. Like said earlier, no laptops come with 6 pin firewire ports due to the power issues, thats why I went with the duel and why my laptop needs USB 2.0. I use firewire at home and USB on my laptop. Works great. Almost as fast as firewire and at times faster it is self powered. I went with the Storix Fusion HDD. ITs great. As small as a wallet and doesn't require external power. As for the laptop. Most websites with have all the specs for their machines. Read over them carefully. Just make sure it has the firewire. That's a must.

Just as a point of reference and not meant to start a platform war, Apple Powerbooks use 6 pin FireWire.

Holy shit your right!!! I forgot about that. Good call Jeff.