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The week at NAB lugging around my aging Compaq EVO n600c got me to thinking about a new laptop. Although laptop at two years old is holding up pretty well I was thinking smaller, lighter, faster.
My current specs are PIII 1.2 mobile, 512MB RAM, 14.1" 1400x1050 display, DVD/CDRW, 30MB Hard Drive. It's 1.2" thick and about 5.7 lbs. Not bad, but not there are much better today.
I was thinking of something under 5lbs with at least a Centrino 1.6GHz cpu. To be specific the IBM T41 series.
I was having a problem with a few video editing apps starting to get flakey too.
Well, after having a look around I found that the IBM was about 1lb lighter in the same configuration. Comparing CPU power I found that according to PCMark 2002 the efficiency of the Centrino design and the PIII are about the same, so I'd only be getting about a 25% increase in performance based on clockspeed alone, no increase in efficiency. Then again the faster hard drive and memory (fsb too) of the newer systems would provide a bigger performance delta, perhaps another 10%.
I had a retail copy of XP Home I had lying around and on a whim I reformatted the drive and installed XP Home and all my apps.
All of my "flakey" behavior is gone. And the best thing is that cleartype has made a tremendous improvement in screen clarity.
So I decided to stay with my currrent laptop for another year. Yeah, it's kind of slow for video editing on the road, but it's workable.
I'm going to upgrade when I can get 2.0GHz in Pentium M form. That should provide a doubling of performance, what I consider a really significant upgrade.
I know I can get a mobile P4 but heat is too much and the battery life really suffers.
I thought I'd share me recent experience with you all.
As you can see I've had a bit of time to catch up on things since the NAB rush has ended.
I'm curious, what are your laptop specs? It is more a desktop replacement or a more of mobile machine? How responsive is it when editing video and other video associated applications?
- Mark
My current specs are PIII 1.2 mobile, 512MB RAM, 14.1" 1400x1050 display, DVD/CDRW, 30MB Hard Drive. It's 1.2" thick and about 5.7 lbs. Not bad, but not there are much better today.
I was thinking of something under 5lbs with at least a Centrino 1.6GHz cpu. To be specific the IBM T41 series.
I was having a problem with a few video editing apps starting to get flakey too.
Well, after having a look around I found that the IBM was about 1lb lighter in the same configuration. Comparing CPU power I found that according to PCMark 2002 the efficiency of the Centrino design and the PIII are about the same, so I'd only be getting about a 25% increase in performance based on clockspeed alone, no increase in efficiency. Then again the faster hard drive and memory (fsb too) of the newer systems would provide a bigger performance delta, perhaps another 10%.
I had a retail copy of XP Home I had lying around and on a whim I reformatted the drive and installed XP Home and all my apps.
All of my "flakey" behavior is gone. And the best thing is that cleartype has made a tremendous improvement in screen clarity.
So I decided to stay with my currrent laptop for another year. Yeah, it's kind of slow for video editing on the road, but it's workable.
I'm going to upgrade when I can get 2.0GHz in Pentium M form. That should provide a doubling of performance, what I consider a really significant upgrade.
I know I can get a mobile P4 but heat is too much and the battery life really suffers.
I thought I'd share me recent experience with you all.
As you can see I've had a bit of time to catch up on things since the NAB rush has ended.
I'm curious, what are your laptop specs? It is more a desktop replacement or a more of mobile machine? How responsive is it when editing video and other video associated applications?
- Mark
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