How to buy a laptop

[scardi]

I' d like to buy a laptop in order to make DVDs from captured AVI files. I have used till now a PC with fast hard-disc that just very few times lost 1 or 2 frames. I don't know which laptop to buy in order to make the same work without lost frames. Could you give me some help please?
Thanks.

[redwudz]

What's your input for capture? TV. DV, VCR or other? Just in general, I would use a device like the Canopus ADVC55 or similar and transfer the DV to your computer with the 1394 Firewire port. It has locked audio/video sync, where sync problems are the most common capture problem. Downside, large files of about 13GB per hour. You will need a fair amount of hard drive space.

Or you might be alright with a USB 2.0 capture device. This would have the advantage of hardware encoding to MPEG-2. No encoding needed, but editing is a bit harder than editing DV. The quality may be a bit lower. The Hauppauge Win TV-USB is one example of this. Much smaller file sizes than DV. You can edit with a good MPEG editor like MPEG-VCR or MPEG Video Wizard.

Neither one of these options needs a especially fast hard drive, as you are not capturing.

[scardi]

My input devices for capture are ADVC 300 and a Canon DV camera. But what I want to know is: which laptop can I use for a succesful capture without lost frames?
Thanks

[Forum Troll]

Just make sure the hard drive is large enought (100 GB +) and fast enought (7200 RPM or faster) and the CPU is fast enough (2.6 Ghz or faster) and you have enough RAM (512 Mb or more) and you should be fine.

[scardi]

Thank you Forum Troll
Someone can give me advice about one or more models of laptop with
these distinctive features?

[MJA]

how much money u wanna spend?

if the weight and money isn't an issue check the dell Inspiron E1705 Dual Core,or nspiron E1505,or XPS line
just be sure to check techbargains.com for discount codes u can ez save up to $750

[redwudz]

If you are just doing DV transfers, that's not capturing, and doesn't really need a very fast hard drive, or large memory or fast CPU, though all of those are very good to have. They will be good for editing, storage and encoding of the DV if you are converting to DVD later.

I've transfered DV to my laptop drive (4300 RPM) via Firewire with never a dropped frame from a ADVC-100. But it's a 40GB hard drive, much too small to be saving DV to. I used a external drive for that, if needed. If you can't find a laptop with a large enough HD or better yet, two hard drives, consider an external drive.

[scardi]

Thanks for your help
This is what I needed to know
Thank you all again.