Best laptop under 400 quid?

Could have bought this for £700.

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 2Ghz, 4MB L2 Cache
Screen: 17" Widescreen CrystalBrite Display
Hard Drive: 320GB Hard Drive (2 x 160GB)
Memory: 2048MB RAM (2 x 1GB Ram)
Optical Drive: High Defination DVD Drive
Graphics: Intel® PM965 Chipset with nVidia GeForce 8400M GS 256MB
Wireless LAN: 802.11a/b/g
Operating System: Windows Vista Home Premium
Webcam: Yes, 0.3 MegaPixel Webcam
Other Items: 1 year warranty, 6 cell battery , 5 in 1 card reader

Since you're editting the dual hard drives will be MUCH quicker, as you'll have source-destination, granted yours is 200mhz faster CPU and better graphics, but overall for what you're doing with it, this one will be faster. Bigger screen too, which you'll want for viewing vids.
 
badbob said:
Could have bought this for £700.

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 2Ghz, 4MB L2 Cache
Screen: 17" Widescreen CrystalBrite Display
Hard Drive: 320GB Hard Drive (2 x 160GB)
Memory: 2048MB RAM (2 x 1GB Ram)
Optical Drive: High Defination DVD Drive
Graphics: Intel® PM965 Chipset with nVidia GeForce 8400M GS 256MB
Wireless LAN: 802.11a/b/g
Operating System: Windows Vista Home Premium
Webcam: Yes, 0.3 MegaPixel Webcam
Other Items: 1 year warranty, 6 cell battery , 5 in 1 card reader

Since you're editting the dual hard drives will be MUCH quicker, as you'll have source-destination, granted yours is 200mhz faster CPU and better graphics, but overall for what you're doing with it, this one will be faster. Bigger screen too, which you'll want for viewing vids.
Click to expand...


With a 17" screen and two hard drives won't that weigh slightly more than a tank?
 
So? You cannot dispute that two seperate hard drives come are ideal when it comes to editting and saving video, and you need the larger screen. 15" widescreen is tiny.
 
badbob said:
So? You cannot dispute that two seperate hard drives come are ideal when it comes to editting and saving video, and you need the larger screen. 15" widescreen is tiny.
Click to expand...

If they're in raid 0, perhaps... but then you're still limited because they're little laptop hard drives running at 5400rpm. However you might actually get better performance putting a fast desktop hard disk into an external enclosure and getting a firewire interface. :)
 
Even if they're not raid 0, just C: and D: it'll still be quicker. Copy a 1GB file from the HD to another directory on the same HD. Now the same file from one HD to the other. Latter will be several magnitudes faster. And considering working with video it's not like the I/O output are a few MB jpg's.

And because 2.5" HD's are a slower than having two drives is even more important.
 
Moving a file on a hard disk to another directory or folder on the same disk is virtually instant... all that is updated is the pointer to the file... there is no rewriting of the data elsewhere.
 
Did I say move? I said copy. Which is what you do when encoding video. Try it, read in a 9GB DVD to C: Now re-shrink it, saving the image to another directory on C:

It'll be much slower than saving the shrunk image to d: (another HD)

Or just copy your games directory into a temp directory on the same HD...it'll take several hours if not a half a day. Now copy your games directory to another HD.
 
Shrinking/re-encoding would be more than likely CPU limited in my experience, but maybe that's just my CPU. :)

Doesn't really matter now though, he has his laptop. :)
 
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Try it, with seperate source/destination the CPU isn't waiting for the hard drives. So backup job is completed much quicker.

If you're working with uncompressed HD video and saving to compressed HD video the difference is startling.

Instead of presuming a single HD is fast- which it isn't if you're doing lots of reading and writing simultaneously in the GB range, try it for yourself. Do you have more than one HD?

My rig has 5 HD's. Two 120GB, 320GB, 250GB and 80GB. One 120GB is OS, Second 120GB is swop, 320GB is for games, 250GB is for working. So at no point are temp files/source/destination/OS accessed on the same HD.
 
Didn't want 17" screen...wanted a 15".

Also it's conversion I do more than editing.

Got to say I never really considered a Mac. They look too expensive and seem to concentrate on style over substance. I'm happy with what I've got.

Triple booting Ubuntu, XP and Vista has all bases covered...LOL
 
i would go for the Acer TM5520 Athlon64 X2 TK55 1GB 80GB DVD±RW Vista Home Premium online retail cost is around £380.00 to £400.00

model LX.TKT0X.128

there are different hardware versions tho

http://www.acer.co.uk/public/page4....en&ctx3=-1&ctx4=United+Kingdom&crc=3596046900

hardware stats.

Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium, AMD® AthlonTM 64 x2 Dual Core TK55 (1.8 GHz, 2 x 256 KB L2 cache), 15.4" WXGA LCD TFT, ATI Radeon® integrated 3D graphics with up to 384 MB of HyperMemory™ (256 MB of dedicated system memory, up to 128 MB of shared system memory), 1024MB (2*512MB) of DDR2 Memory, 80GB HDD, DVD-SuperMulti, 802.11BG WLAN, 5-in-1 Memory Card Reader, 6 Cell Battery(2.5h), 0.3MP Intergrated Crystal Eye Webcam
 
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Can get this for £400 inc vat

Processor: Intel Core Duo T2310 1.46Ghz
Screen: 15.4" TFT Display
Hard Drive : 80GB Hard Drive
Memory: 2048MB RAM
Optical Drive: DVD-RW Super Multi
Graphics Controller: Shared Graphics
Wireless LAN: 802.11a/b/g
Operating System: Windows Vista Home Premium
Other Items: 5 in 1 card reader
Warranty: 1 year collect and return (upgradeable)
 
wth ? The orig post was november 07. I'm pretty sure you couldn't get the above for £400 back then. Anyway th OP has a new laptop already now.

And badboab is right, 2 HD's drastically improve performance during copy operations using one as a source and the other as destination. Even for video converison what ever it'll still be massively quicker.
 
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