laptop hardrives

[teresita]

i want to get a laptop for light editing ...
how do these slow rpm laptops do?
can you really get any work done on them?

[ruinah69]

If you use TMpeg, as most people do for encoding, you can set the task priorities to low so you can actually get a lot of work done. I have a IBM laptop and I encode while doing many other things. I would suggest something with a strong CPU, as most of the video applications are CPU intensive. Memory doesn't seem to play a big role in encoding.

Cheers.

[khelms]

Laptop hard drives are moving from 4200 rpm to 5400 rpm. The new ones also support ATA-100 transfer speeds, so whatever work you could do on a desktop with a 5400 rpm drive, you can probably do on one of the current generation laptops. Mobile CPUs mostly top out at 1.2 Ghz Pentium IIIs, but mobile Pentium 4s are on the way and mobile Athlons are available although they're not offered in many models.

If you don't expect a laptop to perform like a 2.2 Ghz Pentium 4 workstation with a 10000 rpm SCSI drive, it should handle your editing tasks with no problem. You can even get internal 8x or 16x (pricey) CD writers on them now to cut your VCDs or SVCDs.

[Greg12]

I have a 5400 RPM 20 gig drive and when using firewire it only drops one or 2 frames