Anyone using external 1394 drives on Dell laptops ? If so what brand and what issues if any are you seeing. My comapny provides a subsidy to purchase a Dell so I am looking at a P4 2.4.
Yup -4 external Maxtors via a Maxtor PCMCIA card. 1x60gb; 1x80gb and 2x120gb. After an initial Firmware fix from a good bloke in Maxtor Ireland, the new 120gbs are purring nicely away. I've had ongoing fan/s switching on/off Blue Flash dropout. I'm presuming your newer Dellies wont have the BIOS problem though.
You'll have no problem at all. I use a Compaq Presario 700 MHz laptop. Until recently it had a 4200 rpm drive. I captured using a PCMCIA IBM 1394 capture card to this slow drive with no dropped frames. If you have DMA turned on, and background programs turned off, you really don't need a very exotic machine to capture and edit video. Your prospective laptop will work just fine.