Old Laptop Firewire Capture?

[Kirk Gillock]

I have an old Dell Latitude Pentium 3 500MHz laptop with 8mb video ram and 128mb SDRAM. It is running WindowsXP.

My question is, with those specs, if I buy a firewire PCMCIA card would my laptop be able to capture DV AVI files or would it not be able to process quickly enough? My goal is to record straight to harddisk in the field. What do you think? What capture software is best for putting less strain on the CPU and RAM?

Thanks for any advice you can give.
P.K. Gillock

 

[Guest]

Re: Old Laptop Firewire Capture?

PK- Just make sure your hard drive RPM is 7200 and you'll be okay. It's going to be really slow but it's possible to edit on that spec.

 

[kellyboy]

Re: Old Laptop Firewire Capture?

I'm not sure I've ever seen a laptop hard drive faster than 5200 or 5400

Maybe I'm wrong

 

[Kirk Gillock]

Re: Old Laptop Firewire Capture?

Thanks! Bruce, I'm not intersted in editing on the laptop, only capturing. I have a desktop P4 that I edit with. I ran a DV Rack check on my laptop and it said the drive was more than capable of recording files. I was just curious if the RAM and processor could handle it.