Laptops for multimedia

With our mobile life, for many of us addiction to the Internet, and for increasing large numbers of us the desire to actually create multimedia and not just look at it, the question becomes what kind of laptops can support this style of life? Are they affordable and available? The answers are may be depending on your pocket book and definitely yes.

As a comparison, I looked at two laptops, a Toshiba and a Hewlett Packard model before the holidays at a local discount outlet. The Toshiba laptop had an Intel Pentium III 1GHz, 256MB, 30GB, 14.1-inch TFT display, DVD, CD-RW, 56K modem, 10/100 NIC, Windows ME. The Hewlett Packard had a Pentium III 1GHz, 15.1 inch TFT XGA, 30GB, 256M RAM, 8x DVD-ROM, 56K v.90/100BT and CD-RW. (Now I assume both models would come equipped with Windows XP which I definitely would recommend both for stability and for added multimedia support including Microsoft's video editing software that is part of this operating system.)

So it seems that the HP had a larger display screen which is certainly an important factor if you like large displays which I do. As for multimedia playback and creation they should both be able to handle about the same processing in the cpu, but what about the other parts of the system? The Toshiba is just a bit cheaper than the HP. Both had 30 GB hard drives although neither specified the most important specification for multimedia namely the minimum access time but you can assume with new laptops that it should be good enough. The DVD players are nice to have on the road. You can play DVD movies that you can rent at your local video store. I have seen some desktop models that come with DVD writers of various kind but not laptops yet. You do have to be a bit careful here with DVD writers because there are multiple versions of writers and not all results play well in other places. Hopefully, this situation will change toward the end of this year and also the prices should come down. The media is still expensive at $16.00 each. Of course, you do get to record a lot more than you do on a CD-R. Both laptops had a CD-RW drive which is convenient and in fact very nice. The cost of the media here is getting well below 50 cents. Now one thing that neither laptop had is a Firewire connection. If you have a digital camera or camcorder with a Firewire connection which I do, then this is an essential needed connection. You do need to think ahead about this possibility especially for a laptop. It is not as essential for a desktop because you can easily get a small card to go into your computer that can supply this connection.

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