Uh UH! Not just 'any laptop will work.' As someone who travels more than 150,000 miles per year, trust me on this. I've now had more than 16 laptops in my lifespan.
5400 spin drives are just fine, most laps are 4800. Sony and IBM both now have 7200 spin in smaller sizes.
Earl Foote at PC Nirvana builds a great turnkey Vegas system, www.pcnirvana.net
Sony VAIO series are awesome, providing you delete/FDisk the system after buying it and replace their XP with a 'real' XP or Win2k. I just bought one the other day for one of our VASST trainers. We now have 11 laptops in the VASST arsenal, and all of them are either SONY, PC Nirvana, or Fujitsu.
Toshiba is decent, their sound cards (Turtle beach and Creative) suck. Drivers are 'toy' ASIO, so don't expect to get any decent latency settings.
Never had a Dell, so won't comment. Their desktops leave a lot to be desired, hence my reluctance to try a lap.
HP is decent on the low end, their high end machines are terrible for vid due to heating up.
Fujitsu's rock, almost as good as the Sony IMO. Their newer ones, I just played with in Singapore with the 2.8 gig procs, and they are somethin' else.
Get built in Firewire, USB, and 2 PCMCIA slots. Look for the heat dissipation system. Heat KILLS laptops. DVD burners built in are common now. So are CDR's. Few come with floppy's, like you'll ever use one anyway. You'll definitely want decent sound card, look for one that has a card that uses ASIO, or plan on getting an external Firewire or USB card. (more money)
40 gig drives are common, 60's are now happening pretty regularly. I travel with a 60 on board, and another 60 in an ADS battery powered Firewire tank, plus a pair of 120gig drives mounted in ADS tanks for when I've got AC. There is a short article on the Sundance site about my traveling 'suite/sweet' of tools if you are interested.
Anything with a VIA chipset should be avoided, which mostly means looking at Intel procs/mobo's/chipsets in a laptop. Heat. That's the biggie. Also, if it's got a screen protector available, you might want to get one. I've worn out 2 screens this year, and one keyboard. Screens for a VAIO are 240.00, unless under warranty, and keyboards are 60.00...JKL wears out fast.

"Anything with a VIA chipset should be avoided" - Care to expand on that? There's an awful lot of those about.

Where did you see Vegas Video "PLUS"??

Anyways...
Have you looked at www.alienware.com?
They seem to use top rate hardware and also compare favourably(moneywise) to other high-end laptops. Best part is you can configure your own.

M

Thanks for the wealth of information! Where do you find the best price on the Fujitsu in the states? 2PCMCIA slots are hard to find in laptops,aren't they? DVD drives are common now but they don't offer all formats -R/RW & +R/RW and wouldn't an internal add more heat? Anyone used the external Sony with all 4 DVD formats? The laptop screens are just easy to scratch eh?

I used Sony laptop till last October. Switched to Compaq Presario 2810. Two problems are no builtin Firewire and only one PCMCIA slot. Spent about month trying various Cardbus Firewire cards, ended up with SIIG 3-port - works flawlessly with Vegas now. Never had problems with builtin Firewire in Sony. So my only PCMCIA slot is occupied by Firewire card. It appears, I don't need any more PCMCIA slots. Have two USB2 connectors and that's where external 7200rpm hard drive and Pioneer A03 DVD burner get connected. I had to buy Belkin USB2 hub (very small and convenient) to run mouse, ShuttlePRO, and external HD at the same time.
Internal HD (Toshiba 60G 4200rpm) is fine for capture and PTT. When rendering to DVD I use external HD whenever possible because that way internal HD is not generating additional heat. That's the only reason I use extenal HD. And of course I put a high speed fan next to my laptop during rendering.
I'm thinking about Sony again, but I don't want monster laptop they produced recently. Rather something the size of their XG or GR (not GRX) series.
Now that SPOT mentioned it I'll see what Fujitsu is offering.

Alexei

I've been using a Sony GRX 570 for about a year, quite successfully.
Firstly, it has a huge 16" screen which can be set all the way down to 1600x1200 (when you need a bunch of windows open). I ordinarily keep it at 1200 wide.
Built in Firewire - and here's how I use it. Work all day on my desktop with two monitors and media on the Firewire. I keep the VEG files, all audio, video, graphic still files, and AVI renders on the Firewire.
I was even cutting with a tiny 30gig 5400rpm notebook drive in a Firewire housing. Never tried to PTT, but did a bunch of editing on airplanes.
After work at the office, I'll pack up the Firewire and go home,(or on the road) with the Sony laptop, and same media. You never miss a beat.
Processor speed is 1.6 gig and the notebook came with 512mb of memory.
The newer version of this notebook has a DVD burner built-in.
The Sony specs state that you have use of a second monitor, as well, built in, but I never tried this. The whole idea of notebook is portablilty and most add-on LCD screens are bigger than the notebook itself.
Hope this helps...
v.

I'm using 2 monitors in hotels on the road, works great with the new ATI card.
VIA chipsets, even with the 4 in 1 drivers, are still very problematic for LOTS of hardware and software setups. They should be flogged, sued, or at least seriously fined for the crap they put out there. (VIA)

How about the external enclosures for internal drives? I have a sony dru (internal) that I have considered buying a firewire-driven external enclosure for. Was also thinking about the same for a 200gig hard drive. Any thoughts?

bigcreek: just beware if you buy one of those cause I think I read somewhere on this forum that certain enclosures (one of them being ADS Tech if my rememberance is good) won't take more than 120 Go drives...

Silly me--I thought that since my new little Dell Inspiron 2650 worked beautifully with Vegas (and was bought for just $599), surely the other laptops would work pretty much as well. Since I haven't run with the multiple models as Spot has, I'll have to take his word for it. Still, I find it hard to believe that pretty much any machine couldn't be coaxed into working well, as long as the raw horsepower was there.

As for enclosures, I bought a Pyro firewire box and installed a simple drive caddy made by "In Close" (Fry's) in it. Now I can swap any of my growing collection of 120GB drives quickly into the Pyro box, and then just plug it into the laptop.

I had heard that earlier versions of the Pyro enclosure didn't like drives bigger than 137GB or therabouts. What I don't know is how to tell if you have one of the models that has that limitation.

Oh, by the way: the In Close drive caddy system fits inside the Pyro box, but just barely. I had to be a bit creative with the wire harnesses in the back of the box to make it all fit. But it does work.

Sounds like this works great for hard drives. Any problems with DVD burners in the same enclosure?

Nope. I have an A03 in one and it works great.

One other question for you, riredale. Logistically, do you travel (and edit) with the Pyro enclosure? If not, I assume you take the laptop, with some subset of your project, with you? How do you keep track of where files are? Thanks for your help. I'm considering the new Dell P600.

Hi BC,

I'll jump in... the pyro enclosures travel very well. They need no more protection than the laptop does. They can garner questions at the airport security check, but they always clear the gate.

I usually travel with a sony laptop, 120gb HD, burner and accessories... the weight starts to add up, but its great to be mobile and take advantage of "normal downtime".




HTH, MPH

Tips:
http://www.martyhedler.com/homepage/Vegas_Tutorials.html

What laptop models have ASIO drivers ?

Does the Sony feature ASIO ?

Nat

Bump

Probably not internal laptop audio. But you can get USB card with ASIO drivers.

Look here for some references: http://www.usb-audio.com

Alexei