if your that bothered dom, then you have legal rights to cancel the order, if bought on-line you have a cooling-off period after ur purchase.

search online for goods and service act etc, or ring TS and simply ask them, only if tiny refuse.

But you can't take a tower or desktop anywhere where as you can with a laptop. And you can't put it away when you've finished. With a laptop you are much more flexible where you choose to work.

Basically you are paying extra for convenience of a laptop. Simple.

My laptop setup works fine - I run Adobe Premiere Pro on it. The only limitation is hard drive space (60Gb - holds 5 hours of footage plus space needed for programs too!) - I will simply plug in a firewire drive to expand - currently looking at the many options (see another thread I started on this). But performance is not an issue - I don't get any dropped frames for example.

Here's my setup:

1235pounds inc vat(early march 2005 - will be cheaper now, not including video editing software):
Dell Inspiron 8600 Centrino 855GM chipset
1.6GHz Pentium M
7200rpm 60Gb P-ATA IDE hard drive (7200rpm as recommended by adobe)
1Gb RAM (as recommended by Adobe)
15.4" WUXGA (1900x1200 pixels TFT LCD display)
128Mb ATI Radion 9600 Pro Dual Head (so that I can split screen with my widescreen 17" samsung 730MW LCD when at home - i can drag windows on to the 17" giving me more workspace)
intel 2200b/g wireless wi-fi.org approved WPA2/AES encrypted wireless
Windows XP Pro
Microsoft Office Basic 2003 (Word, Excel, Outlook)
No Bluetooth (saved a little cash - didn't need this)
1yr warranty
tough nylon carry case

You can get cheaper than this now, probably under 1000, especially if you leave out Office, get a cheaper graphics card.

Also think of longevity. The newer Centrino sonoma/915GM chipset is out now(533Mhz bus instead of 400MHz, Serial ATA hard drive support, and PCI Express). Basically this means that data can flow a bit faster around your machine which is vital
for video editing.

Dell already have laptops out with this: Inspiron 6000 and 9300, also Fujistu Siemens and Sony and others too.


S-ATA hard drive wont make much difference yet because it is not the the hard drive bus that restricts a hard drives performance but the speed at which the drive spins - the spindle speed, standard existing parallel ATA/IDE supports upto 100Megabytes per second but if you look on the internet you'll see that 7200rpm drives peak at around roughly 35-45Mbytes/sec i think. first version of SATA supports 150Mbytes/sec but until drives are made that mechanically rotate faster that limit wont be released. The benefit is that if you buy a SATA capable laptop now you could upgrade it in future. SATA is also more reliable, smaller cable and will be cheaper.

Can't agree more re: convieniance. But for me, my laptop is solely used for web and desktop publishing. Personal thang, but I like to use my desktop for it's power, upgradability, connectivity and better sound. Most viditers use two + monitors too, meaning all around a desktop is the preferred solution for those of us who like to think we're "into" editing.

On the other hand, a laptop is perfect for those that don't want the whole two + monitors, 7.1 surround, Matrox cards, 2GB RAM, dual xeons and terabyte of storage space just for good measure.

In other words, a laptop is probably the sensible option .

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- I can use my laptop and my Samsung 17" TFT LCD widescreen 730MW
I can split the screen so that I can have some windows on my 1900x1200 WUXGA laptop screen and other windows on my 1280x768 WXGA samsung - so I can get that extra screen workspace with my laptop and another monitor hooked up to it.
Though there is a 3 head graphics card available for desktops for 3 screens


There is probably a firewire or PCMCIA sound device available that does this. For some laptops hooked up on 3 core mains (i.e. with earth) such as Dell you *may* need to remove ground loop on your audio setup (mixer and amplifier) by buying direct injection boxes e.g. Behringers 20 quid DI 120. See soundonsound.com forums for more advice on ground loop elimination and indeed 7.1 sound. Laptops using just 2 core mains (i.e. no earth, such as compal and clevo available form nusystems and digitalvillage respectively should not have ground loop. but for those that do it is rectifiable as i said with a di box)
visit the forthcoming sounds-expo.co.uk in london in mid april for 7.1 ideas.

only useful if the video effects sw takes advantage of the card - but for rendering dv effects and playback is this really useful if the card's output does not end up on the final version of dv that you are making?

possible on a laptop but heat might be an issue

that's where desktop power is an advantage but perhaps superfluous for many - also bear in mind dual core centrino laptops are due out in 2006.

get a lacie firewire 800 external drive for the laptop and attach it via a PCMCIA 800 firewire card. but it would be more expensive than a desktop solution.


Well it's a personal choice, laptops offer great convenience and flexibility you pay more for also at the expense of limited upgrade options. but even a desktop needs it's motherboard upgraded eventually and bit by bit desktop upgrading might be uneconomic or too involved technically for some.[/quote]

btw ground loop is the hum you can get plus other clicks and pops from devices in your system - in case some were wondering. galvanic isolation (i.e transformer) such as that in a di box should reduce or eliminate this

Rjamesd - that is really quite useful information, thanks for that, but with all those bits sticking out of and hanging off the laptop, isn't it going to look like some sort of bizarre robot octopus hellbent on taking over the world and killing us all?

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Yeah thanks alot for all that. I went with the best I could afford, it's an Acer though - but I'm not too worried about that..

My current desktop is 2ghz with 768 meg of ram, this works more than well enough for what I need and use it for! The laptop is 64bit 3ghz, with only 512 meg of ram. The ram can and probably will be upgraded sometime in the future so this laptop should last me a good few years I'm hoping! I got an external 200gb HDD too.

Few questions:

1) Will 512 meg of ram be sufficient? I know it won't be super fast, but will I be able to edit? I've only experienced 256mb (way too slow) and 768mb (no problems).

2) The HDD in the laptop is not 7200rpm, what shall I do about this? Shall I capture to the slower internal drive or should I capture straight to my 7200rpm external drive (via USB though)?

Thanks again!

editing to ex. hard drive = hell.
I recently tried editing to an external HDD (the lacie 1TB mentioned earlier actually) via FW800... was SOO SLOW... then I emptied my laptop's (my G5 is dead ATM) HDD to the lacie and copied all the video files over - was like magic... however both HDD's are 7200, and I have never used a 5400 that I know of, so I can't ereally help there - but moral of story is that any external connection other than IDE / SATA / UATA will be ALOT worse then 5400 / 7200 difference...



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Oh right, thanks for that.

I haven't got a 4 to 4 pin firewire cable yet so I can't try it out but I'm hoping it'll be fine with a 5200rpm drive! I'll just keep a spare couple of gigs free on that then transfer to the external.

If 5200 rpm is too slow where can I buy an 60/80gb 7200 rpm laptop drive from?

Has anyone had an experience with 5200rpm drives and editing/capturing?

Thanks

Here's some options:

60GB running at 7,200 RPM (I went with this for my TOTL powerbook)

100GB running at 4,200 RPM (I have never run on anything unv=der a 7,200 so I dont know the preformance drop here... this seems rahter slow, but I think It may have been worth it not that I struggle so much with keeping the 14 GBs required to burn a DVD free...)

just my 2 cents (HDD's?)