Viditing on a laptop

[Ian in Northampton]

Eldest daughter wants a laptop to take with her to do video editing (and watching DVDs)... I have a budget of up to £700. I think that, for that, I can pick up something with a reasonably fast processor, half a gigabyte of memory, a separate graphics card, a firewire port and a DVD rewriter.

Question: anyone have any thoughts as to the feasibility of viditing on a laptop? Any recommendations? Anything to look out for? Any/all inputs gratefully received.

[Mihai]

I think laptop hard drives are not fast enough (4200 - 5400 rpm), so she should definitely carry around an external 7200rpm HDD.

[Ian in Northampton]

Thanks SVHS. Perhaps for Christmas...

[Marc Peters]

Although not ideal, it'll be fine provided you keep the drives in good order (defrag etc).

[Ian in Northampton]

Thanks Marc. Thanks Marc. Thanks Marc. Thanks Marc. etc. etc. I was thinking about SVHS's recommendation, though: isn' there an element of "it's as broad as it's long"? By which I mean an equation in which (internal transfer speed + slow rpm) = (external transfer speed + high rpm)? Or is the fatal flaw in my surmising the fact that external transfer isn't slower than internal transfer?

I think I've identified what I want. It's a Dell Inspiron 8600 with 512MB, a 128MB graphics card, 60GB disk, 1394 interface and what is by all accounts a very sexy WUXGA screen - and £10 under budget...

[Ian in Northampton]

...oh, and an 8x DVD+/-RW...

[Marc Peters]

Speaking from experience, as long as you keep the drives in good condition you'll be fine. You could also capture to an external drive with a higher RPM and firewire connection too.

[Ian in Northampton]

Have we got a teensy weensy problemette on the board this evening - multiple postings the same, postings apparently not being posted then arriving?

[Marc Peters]

My connection is a little slow...

[Ian in Northampton]

Gotcha. I have the same problem with my brain...