Laptop

[Barry Beckham]

I had an interesting experience yesterday. I went to PC world armed with a DVD of PTE5 slide shows containing animation and tried the disk in various laptops.

The view I have come to after that excersize is that you cannot buy a laptop for this sort of animated slide show without testing it first.

The most expensive laptop in the store at £1299 with what appeared a good Nvidia graphics card could not handle the animation. Most of the others couldn't either, but we didn't try the real cheap ones.

We tested most of those they had in the £600 range and higher that gave a high spec with 2 gig of ram and a known graphics card.

Only one seems to handle all I could throw at it and the cost was £999. It was a toshiba Satelite P200-143, ironically the same name as my current laptop that has passed its sell by date.

The spec was:

Intel T5500

17 inch screen

2 Gig ram

1.66 GHz

200 MB hard drive

128 Nvidia Gforce Go 7600 Graphics card

http://tinyurl.com/28wxcx

[chris]

Barry

I use a Dell XPS 1700 laptop which is superb

You can get a 512mb graphics card that can handle anything you throw at it

See here

http://www1.euro.dell.com/content/products...;l=en&s=bsd

Chris

[ADB]

Barry

Don't know if this is the problem but did you run the show from the DVD's or Hard Drive?

I'm picking off CD or DVD the laptop may not be able to keep up whereas if launched from the hard drive may be a different story.

Cheers

[Gilio]

Barry, you have to tested i think like me with a memory stick!

[Barry Beckham]

I did think about using the hard drive, but my thought process went like this.

If I can find one that runs perfectly from a DVD, then I am assured of it running from the hard drive. If it works on the hard drive, but not from a DVD, perhaps that is too close for comfort. Well, that is what went through my mind.

I abandoned laptops a while ago for demo purposes because they seemed unpredictable, but I have to say I was surprised at how many laptops could not handle animation. The fades were all right, but they couldn't do both together.

I will look at the Dell and I see there is also another Toshiba with a 256 nvidia card.

I will probably be buying one some time this year, but no rush. This time I want to make sure what I get handles CS3 raw files and PTE5

[cjdnzl]

I had an interesting experience yesterday. I went to PC world armed with a DVD of PTE5 slide shows containing animation and tried the disk in various laptops.

The view I have come to after that excersize is that you cannot buy a laptop for this sort of animated slide show without testing it first.

<snip>

I would be interested to know what shows you used for your tests, and whether they were compiled DVD shows, or PTE exe files simply saved to a DVD?

If the shows were executables saved to a DVD, then the read speed of the DVD drive would be suspect; but if you were using a compiled DVD show from VideoBuilder, then the performance of the application used to play the video and how the show was assembled comes into it.

I recently bought a laptop - an Alienware wide screen (an American manufacturer, recently acquired by Dell), with a 1.6 GHz dual-core processor, an Nvidia GeForce Go 7600 graphics card, and a dual-layer DVD R/RW drive. These machines are recognized as good gaming machines, so I figured that it should be ok for playing slide shows and DVDs.

Almost the first DVD I tried to play just staggered from slide to slide, with jerky transitions. The DVD was compiled by a professional photog, who later said that it didn't run on some computers. I put this down to her using images that were too large, and not resized to suit a TV screen, thereby choking the software codec in the application running the show - Windows Media Player.

Other shows, from commercial film DVDs to DVDs I have made with suitably resized images run properly, so I am happy that the computer is ok, but I tend now to look askance at DVDs rather than the computer.

My attitude now is that DVDs are strictly for TV showing, and exe files are for computer showing. Playing a DVD on a computer is a last resort (unless you have a Mac).

Colin

[daveharris]

Barry,

Several of us in in the South Wales AV Group have purchased laptops from Evesham. I went to their showroom at Evesham and tried a couple.

The one thing I made clear was that the Graphics must not be "onboard". At the time I purchased, 2 years ago they had two laptops in that category.

Regards,

Dave

[Barry Beckham]

I took a number of shows to the store and the one that I tried first was the one called PTE5 demo here

http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/slideshow/pte5.zip

The second one was a fairly heavy wedding AV with lots of animation, its about an 80 meg file and I don't have that one on my site.

Any problems with a laptop capable of coping with animation will soon be shown up by the PTE5.zip demo above.

With regards to graphics cards I recall Igor saying sometime ago that I should avoid a laptop with shared graphics memory, so I stayed away from any of those.

Had another interesting experience yesterday while in Tescos. A laptop for £299. What surprised me was the fast dual core processor, half a gig of ram and a very respectable Nvidia graphics card. Sadly they were not set up so I could not try them, but that would be ironic to find a laptop for that money in Tescos that copes with animation.

Seriously I also need a powerful laptop for Photoshop demonstrations. Now we are in the RAW age I cannot reduce resolution to allow the laptop to cope with what I want to do in Photoshop and I do place a little pressure on Photoshop when I use it for demos

Barry

[cjdnzl]

I took a number of shows to the store and the one that I tried first was the one called PTE5 demo here

http://www.beckhamdigital.co.uk/slideshow/pte5.zip

<snip>

Barry

Thanks for the demo show, Barry. I ran it on my Alienware machine and it was dead smooth right through, as I expected, but it's nice to confirm its performance all the same.

Colin.