Question regarding ADVC-100, firewire & low spec laptop

[will_sickly_33+]

Hello,
I have some experience with capturing (did you see that? I can even put words in bold and it's only my first post) but what with having an ADVC-100 and a laptop I wondered what the effect would be of capturing to my laptop rather than my desktop (Athlon 2ghz computer) would be?
I know all the work is done within the ADVC itself, but what with my laptop (IBM thinkpad R30) only having a P3-1gh processer I don't want to go to the expense of buying a PCMCIA firewire card if the results I'm going to get will be not worth the effort.
I would test it and not bother you good people with a forum post but as I say I don't have firewire capabilities on my laptop.
I have 13gb free so could probably just grab an hours worth of DV which will be ample for my needs.
Does anyone do it currently?
Any thoughts would be most appreciated.
Bill

[The village idiot]

OK, here is the lowest processor speed I have tried:

Toshibe Portege 3010 notebook with a pentium 266Mhz and 96MB ram. Large success using DVio for the transfer application and an external firewire hard drive, with a Razzle DV Bridge, or JVC BR-DV3000 DV deck! The internal harddrive will mostly work for me, but with only 6gb total, kind of pointless. With your laptop, you might be able to run an appliction that allows for preview video while recording, but I would still go to an external firewire hard drive if it was me. Check out the tools section for some freeware applications, and have fun!

Editing on my laptop is a whole other thing It can be done, but takes a long time to scroll through the video to find your edit points, then more time to copy the parts to a DV file. The output to DV file is only at about 50% realtime, without any kind of transitions, cuts only.

All in all, you should be OK, even with your internal drive and a nice light weight application like DVio, or some of the others.

[will_sickly_33+]

Many thanks for the response
....
To be honest, my intention is to see whether I can gain improved captures by connecting the ADVC directly to my satellite TV source.
I can't do this at present (for reasons I won't bore you with!) so my plan it is capture 30 minutes clips with the laptop and then transfer the un-edited avi to my desktop PC via firewire.
I'll then use Pinnacle Studio to edit, store and then burn to a DVD-r; all from my normal PC.
Also, it would be nice to have the facility to capture camcorder footage whilst mobile.
Don't ask me what possible scenario there would be for this but it would be a nice option!
Thanks again village, I'll go get a PCMCIA firewire card from ebay
Bill


EDIT: Also, I just bought a USB2.0/firewire external case for what I thought was just DVD-roms/burners etc but having recieved it today have seen I can use it as an external HDD.
I have a spare 30gb HDD lying around so may well use that; it'll mean I can easily transfer the footage from it to the laptop (in effect I'll be able to simply work from the HDD rather than copy it across first).

[The village idiot]

Having an external firewire drive is nice for DV work. You can also buy VERY long firewire cables and firewire repeaters if you want to connect the ADVC to your desktop/tower computer. They get a little expensive though, like more than the price of an external drive.

[will_sickly_33+]

Hey,
I'm sat with the external closure device now.
A DVD-Rom drive works perfectly but having tried a HDD in it I get nothing (oh, BTW, I didn't even need to install drivers for the DVD-Rom, it appeared straight away as a drive in windows explorer).
The drive is already formatted, it has a previous version of WinXP on and is set to master but like I say; nothing
Bill


EDIT: Forget it, I figured it
When I took out the DVD-rom this afternoon I removed the power supply but onl;y re-fitted one of two leads.
HDD all working fine now.
Can't wait to get that PCMCIA firewire card now