Laptop Advice?

[Carlton]

I am in search of a good laptop for on-location image viewing. Anyone here use one of these? Any suggestions welcome.

Thanks!

[Swampy]

I'm using a Dell P3 1ghz with 16" 1600x1200 res screen, but what I really want is one of these guys:

http://www.1beyond.com/

[Bilbo]

$5595 !!!!!!!! For a laptop!????!!!

Here in the UK- I have just ordered a Dell laptop which was about £1600. Fortunately I get to claim back the VAT at 17.5%. Even so, I had to have a beer before I pressed "Enter" on the order!

Bilbo

[Swampy]

Yeah, but that's the cheap one I think. After you add the 2nd and 3rd 80gb hard drive striped to get you 240 gigs and the second processor.....The price jumps up a bit. But, look at everything you get!!! :D

[szszsz]

Originally posted by swampy101
I'm using a Dell P3 1ghz with 16" 1600x1200 res screen, but what I really want is one of these guys:

http://www.1beyond.com/


“ It’s not a heavy laptop, it’s a light TOWER!”

I've a Dell C840 P4 1.6 and am quite happy. Dell is terrible about ordering (mixing up orders). However, when you have it the service is fine - make sure you get the 3y onsite warrenty!
Most important get a laptop with at least SXGA+ resolution (1400x1050). If weight is less of an issue you might want to have 1600x1200 (UXGA) or even 1920x1200 (W-UXGA+)
And get enough disk space...
Make sure your memory modules are at least 512 MB (1GB is still veeeery expensive but the only way to get really a lot of memory (more than 1GB in total usually)

[Carlton]

I had no clue what I was getting into here, as I have discovered there are many to choose from. This is worse than choosing a camera! One thing I really like are the larger screens. Kinda got it narrowed down to 1) 17" Toshiba 2) 17" Gateway 3) 17" or 16" Sager 4) 17" Prostar 5) 17" HP
6) 16" Sony 7) 16" Dell

Swampy,
I've booked-marked the 1Beyond site, so when I get rich this will be one of my rewards. Very Nice!

SZSZSZ,
Thanks for your info....where did you find a WUXGA screen?

[Swampy]

I hear the Toshiba is a good machine. I'm not familiar with thier screens though. I was testing some Dell laptops not to long ago and I am familiar with thier screens, and they offer:
XGA (1024x768)
WXGA (1280x720)
SXGA (1400x1050)
WSXGA+ (1680x1050)
UXGA (1600x1200)
WUXGA (1920x1200)

These options aren't available on every laptop, but they have these resolutions available. Thier Inspiron 8600 comes in WUXGA, WSXGA+ and WXGA.

[szszsz]

Originally posted by Carlton

SZSZSZ,
Thanks for your info....where did you find a WUXGA screen?

As Swampy already suggested Dell offers this resolution. We (in our company >200 employee) use only Dell Latitudes. Their Inspirons are a bit less solid / have lower quality parts.
The Latitude D800 comes with a 15.4" screen which can be WUXGA (make sure you order this one). The Laptop isn't huge, and therefore the pixels are really small. Anyway, a friend of mine loves this resolution with the small pixels.

[Swampy]

I wouldn't go as far as saying the Inspiron's have lower end parts. :D

I have an Inspiron 8000 P3 1ghz. All the way up to the end of us using Dell laptops in our company, my laptop had a better screen and video card than the CPx, C600~C640. My keyboard never failed, nor did my mouse button break, which happened on the lattitudes all the time.

Not saying the Inspiron's don't have problems, I've heard of some people having problems. I've also got another friend that has an Inspiron 8100 and it's been fine for 1 1/2 years now. They both will have thier problems throughout the lines. Same deal with HP's and IBM's.

Still enjoying my 1600x1200 res laptop....

[S_Leeper]

You might also want to check here...
http://www.alienware.com/system_pages/area-51m.aspx

A little less than $5k. If I remember correctly the p4 3.2mzh processor has hyperthreading, which has a noticable boost on performance... and the color is nice too!

[Carlton]

YEEEA, I got my laptop. Toshiba 17" widescreen, XP Pro, it seems to be a gem. The screen looks wonderful! Now, coming from a Mac (well I still use it), when done using a card reader, I would drag the Icon to the trash and a pop-up would tell me is safe to remove CF card. It appears with XP, I just remove the card?? Is this true?? Also, on the bottom row of icons, one states that I can safely remove hardware (ie:card reader) does this always need to be done? Any help here will be greatly welcomed.

Thanks,
Carlton

[S_Leeper]

For my usb external harddrive I have to do the safely remove... For my printer I don't.
For my usb cf reader I don't remove it, I just unplug the card when through transferring, without problem.

[StormChaser]

I'm a die-hard mac user, so I'm very happy with my iBook. Don't understand PC's and never will. They do things that go beyond my comprehension level.

[NZDoug]

Agreed.
Do it once and right. Dont look back.
Get a grunty small screen TiBook and plug in a 20 inch monitor for serious editing at home base.
You can read about the rest in the problems dept.

[Carlton]

Yep, I'll always be a Mac person, even though the hard drive failed in my imac just after the one year warranty ran out (there is no perfect computer). I would of gotten an Mac notebook, but the software I want for on-location client viewing ( Fuji Studio Master Pro) is not made for Mac and they have no plans to make it for Mac. Sure, there is software made for Mac that I could of used for viewing, but it costs almost as much as my Toshiba laptop and Studio Master Pro is free from my lab. So, I look at it as a smart investment and now I have the best of both worlds. ;)

[proberts]

Originally posted by Carlton
Yep, I'll always be a Mac person, even though the hard drive failed in my imac just after the one year warranty ran out (there is no perfect computer). I would of gotten an Mac notebook, but the software I want for on-location client viewing ( Fuji Studio Master Pro) is not made for Mac and they have no plans to make it for Mac. Sure, there is software made for Mac that I could of used for viewing, but it costs almost as much as my Toshiba laptop and Studio Master Pro is free from my lab. So, I look at it as a smart investment and now I have the best of both worlds. ;)

Virtual PC runs well on my PowerBook. If you like Macs, you should think about Virtual PC.

Paul

[Sneakyracer]

Originally posted by Anthonie
I'm a die-hard mac user, so I'm very happy with my iBook. Don't understand PC's and never will. They do things that go beyond my comprehension level.

Thats how i feel about Macs. Being that you cant see what they are doing. hehehe.

I do use them ocassionally and they are very very good photoshop platforms. But for viewing Large Fuji S2pro image files i wouldnt use anything less than a G4 powerbook. I used one for a shoot but the camera shooting software didnt run too well and if i connected the camera to download pics to the mac when unpluged, the images were gone from the memory card!

[jhawk1000]

Mac vs. PC? I like the Macs but have PCs. Our latest, to replace the laptop taken in Romania, is a Toshiba P10-429S laptop which is down a bit from the 17" model. It has a 15.4" screen, Wi-fi wireless, hyper threading and works very nicely. We replaced our brand new but never used Image Tank S2, 40 gig with a used 20gig Digital Wallet and it works good also. WE ARE READY to Rock and Roll now.

Mel

[turbo-944]

The Toshiba P25 17" widescreen is great. I've been using it for a little over a month now.

I don't know what Dell is offering in widescreens, but Toshiba and Dell are the only laptops I'll recomment to my clients. They have had the best reliability & support of all the major brand systems I have ever used or supported.

Dan.:D

[shutterdoug]

Originally posted by proberts
Virtual PC runs well on my PowerBook. If you like Macs, you should think about Virtual PC.

Paul

Does Virtual PC come as part of OS X or is it a seperate ($$) program?

[bebop1065]

Virtual PC is a product from Connectix that was recently purchased by Micro$oft.

It doesn't work on G5 processors.

Think Powerbook for your laptop needs.

[Wichita Wayne]

Here is my thoughts on laptops. Be sure to get either and Apple or a PC :rockon: !! Either one will work fine. Then max out the RAM to give you the most efficient setup for doing photos. If you happen to be using Windows ME then do not install more RAM than 512MB, that's all that ME will handle. We also do not have hot rod laptops so we try to keep the loaded programs to a minimum and work with only one major program at a time. We have two PC laptops and an iBook and they all work great. The PC laptops are an old Compaq Presario with a 450 mH processor and 256MB of RAM, an Aopen OpenBook with a 750 mH processor and 512 MB RAM, and who knows about the iBooks processor but it has 640 MB of RAM. The iBook is my son-in-laws so I am not up on it's specs. He is going to switch to PC soon and give the iBook to my 14 year old son so then we will be a PC only shop. The Compaq is slow but works great on location as a mass storage device for downloading and viewing on location. We have upgraded its HD to 30 GB. The Aopen was purchased from a friend at a killer price and has really worked out well. It has native firewire support and a 30 GB HD, and works as our main download device on location. For a low end laptop the Aopen has been great. The IBook has never been taken on location except for a few vacations so I cannot judge it from experience. However, I would not hesitate to use the thing because it works great in the studio. We cannot get the iBook to work with RAW files because it gives us a "Not enough memory" error and locks, but we mostly use JPG so this is not a big problem. As far as the Apple vs. PC wars I have never been a one-trick-pony. You simply learn the machines rules and follow them and either one will do the job. I would be more concerned about price than I would be about Apple or PC. For desktop computers I usually build and maintain my own PC based machines. I kind of grew up with PC's so they seem to be the easiest and cheapest for me to deal with.

[sandman]

I'm writing this now on my laptop it's great by a british company MULTIVISION , 2.8, 512 ram 60 gig H/D 15'' XS moniter, it's not that light , battery life of 2 hrs providing you don't use the DVD much.
The only big issue i've got is the screen , you just can't trust it when you're editing , the contrast is so picky you only have to move it a few centimeters or move your head slightly and the contrasts either to light or dark .
So i don't do any editing on it anymore , rather wait till i'm indoors on my desktop .. but it's fine for every thing else ,and even after nearly a year i'ts specs are still top notch

Brian

[proberts]

Originally posted by shutterdoug
Does Virtual PC come as part of OS X or is it a seperate ($$) program?

It's seperate, as was pointed out, it's now a Microsoft product- but it comes in several flavors, with and without various Microsoft OS' bundled. You can also get it as a part of Office X Professional with Windows XP. There's much conjecture that MS will stop doing a native Office version in the future and ship VPC-based versions.

Paul

[calcruiser]

The HP zt3010us configured properly looks pretty good to me although I have been looking at the Dell's as well. I like the 15.4 in wide screen that HP has with a nice graphics card.
Decisions decisions..... paper or plastic... :-)

[Wichita Wayne]

I just got one at work and it is really nice. It has a fast Pentium 4 processor and all the goodies, and the wide screen is almost as nice as my 19" LCD monitor. Wish I had the same setup at home.