What do you think of this Laptop for video editing?
 

Its on sale this weekend at Compusa for $1050.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...&s=pc&n=507846

Itd be using dreamweaver, photoshop and Premiere 1.5 pro on it. Do you think its powerful enough?
Do you think its a good deal for $1,050?

Processor-wise it should be fine, but I'd juice up the ram quite a bit. Nice system.

thanks. Thats the most memory I could find within that general price range. And I know laptops are really hard to upgrade

i have the exact same specs on my emachines and it rocks for editing

thanks! what do you use for editing if you dont mind saying

i have the exact same specs on my laptop. it edits fine, but could use extra ram. also when you're editing the battery dies way quicker, so if you plan on going somewhere that you can't plug your laptop in, dont bother.

Sorry to be a killjoy. IMO that is plain not enough horse-power for the apps you've named. That means if you have multiple apps open or head to any files of size, the machine is going to bog down cause it will have to page swap. Plus you'll be more prone to errors and OS decay. If that's the budget and you just have to go that way, suggest you run defrag often and power the cycle the computer once in awhile. Since it is a laptop, you'd do that part anyway I suspect. That will keep things as orderly as possible.

Best of luck to ya and enjoy the new toy. I'd spec out a laptop that cost more than twice that much for the apps. The half gig ram is the first problem btw.

compaq/hp sucks! how do I know that? I had it, it was slow (p4 mobile procesor sucks), the windows was crashing for no reason. Now I have toshiba p30 with p4 HT 3.33Ghz, it rocks.

Agree, also look at IBM and DEll. Check the Dell Outlet for the deals of the day. You might get lucky.

Well Dell uses the P4M too. No hands on experience with the toshiba mentioned, so must defer to maddox.

go with at least 1 gig of ram, more if it'll handle it. and if you do a lot of video editing, get a good usb 2 or fire wire external drive. you'll be surpised how quickly you run out of space with "only" 60 gig.

[edit]I have a toshiba, it's lasted me over a year on the road. but it's the second I got, 1st one died after only a month. [/edit]

hard disk speed is really important :2 cents: it doesn't say that

not true, i have the same specs on my laptop and I run homesite, photoshop, premiere pro and more at the same time...all the time....

i don't notice any slowdown with only 524mb ram either....and if your doing video editing it is the processor you want fastest, not the ram...they have done a lot of tests and ram has almost no effect on the speed, it is all processor

Also video editing means alot of things are you doing clips for the net or 2 hour dvds , thats makes a big difference. Jace is right dv magazine did the test and the thing that really effected rendering speed was cpu. Hey show ram over a gig, raids and the difference they made was so small it wouldnt be worth cost.

Couple things...

I agree, Compaq laptops are satan. To be avoided. I'd recommend IBM as well.

Also, laptops are getting more and more easy to upgrade, so you shouldn't worry too much about that. What's more important is how much it can be upgraded.

The hard drive on that Compaq is only 4200 rpm, that's pretty slow. I would prefer a 7200 rpm drive like the one in my Dell Inspiron 8600 laptop that I edit video with. Of course, the laptop I purchsed cost over $2150 eight months ago, so there is a definite price difference. 512 Mb of RAM runs Premiere Pro fine for me, but you can always get more. And generally one wants to use a different physical hard drive from the OS (like a 200Gb external drive connected thru firewire) to keep the video files on. Good luck!

I have no opinion about Dells cause I never had any, however this Toshiba I currently own is very sweet. Its the kind of these media center desktop replacement laptops which would be perfect for video editing, it has 17 inch screen, 100GB drive and a hyper threaded P4 processor with 3.33 clock, I put a custom memory so it has a 1,5GB of RAM now. Don't know if you have this model available in States but its *P30* and I highly recommend that.

My previous HP laptop was nx9010 with p4 2.8 mobile processors 1gb of ram and 60gb drive. It was very slow because of the mobile processor, the most annoying thing was that I was unable to sleep the OS, it always showed blue screen.

i had a toshiba satellite. i used it for editing as well. after a year and 4 months, the mother board crapped out. when i took it in for repair, they told me that 4 out 10 laptops being brought in for repair were laptops like mine....all with the same problem.

:321GFY toshiba

I have my Toshiba laptop for only 2 months, we will see what happens in a year :)

IMHO the specs are subpar in order to do some serious video-editing..

Shit you seriously enjoy working with only 512MB :helpme :helpme (find it hard to belive specialy running all those programs at same time)

BTW the part where you say ram doesn't matter is utter bullshit...

1GB of memory and 7200 rpm hard disk with good video card. This is you need at laptop!

I would shoot for 2 years , but thats not so bad.. 1.4 is fairly good amount of usage

I tried editing on my Toshiba 2.8Ghz laptop and it was far far slower than my dedicted desktop PC. Laptop hard disks usually spin slower than a desktop PC. 60GB is a little small and you'll eat that space up very quick if you do even a moderate amount of editing. If your serious about editing, you should really have a second disk just for your video files. A bigger external firewall hard disk would help though. :2 cents:

I agree with the Hard drive opinions. Your HD will be your bottleneck on that machine when doing video editing, multitasking with a very little ram will force the computer to become very slow and running virtual memory on a slow HD will make things worse.