Cal Club Autocross Forums

The videos from my new Hero HD are great, sure wish I could share them with the world !

But, my 3 to 4 year old laptop doesn't have enough stuff---CPU and/or RAM and/or ???.. Each time I try to do anything with a file it just decides to turn off the damn machine and upon starting gives me a SMART warning to back up the drive beacuse it has terminal cancer!!!

Does anyone have an old Desktop/tower that you are using for a door stop?? I'll trade you an Apple II plus or a 512 McIntosh with extra floppy drive

Don

What's the make/model or specs of your current machine? Maybe we can figure out what the bottleneck is.

I think any machine newer than your 3 or 4 year-old latop isn't going to be in doorstop mode just yet.

As far as the SMART warning, this is the hard drive telling your sytsem that it has encountered some errors lately that may be hinting at an emminent hard drive failure. Back it up, replace it, or just understand that it's liable to fail at any moment.

Check to be sure the machine hasn't ingested too much dust into it's heat radiator(s) or that the cooling fan(s) have not failed. Machines are engineered to protect themselves by slowing down when they overheat. Blow it out with compressed air, preferably in the reverse direction of it's normal airflow or disassemble it and clean it out. Many machines have easily-removed fans for exactly this purpose.

Over-heating can cause hard drive errors leading to hard drive failure, too.

Make sure you're not obstrucing the air vents when you use it - an actual lap or soft surface can block the vents on the bottom that rely on the small gap between machine and table. Make sure you haven't lost the rubber bumpers on the bottom that provide this gap.

You don't have a desktop that's newer than your laptop?

Dell's having some pretty decent sales right now. I got my work to order me a new Vostro 420 w/ a 23" monitor for about $700 shipped. It should have enuf juice for full HD video editing. There's some other deals for the $500 price range that should also be able to do the work & last you a few more years.

Have you checked Costco? Pretty good deals to be had there if a PC is what you're looking for. Or Apple does offer refurb/prior generation systems at a discount. Or if you're a teacher/student they do good discounts there too.

either that, or hit up http://www.pricewatch.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; to build another one!

+1 on Refurbished Mac's! Especially good, ie. easy to use, if you're not really computer savvy

http://tinyurl.com/ybu8m42

If you're a PC guy and you're still looking, these things Palero is selling should have plenty of HP for video viewtopic.php?f=8&t=3440" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Kurt Rahn wrote:If you're a PC guy and you're still looking, these things Palero is selling should have plenty of HP for video viewtopic.php?f=8&t=3440" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Kurt is right.

You could set those bad boys up as a cluster to process all your video.

Kurt Rahn wrote:If you're a PC guy and you're still looking, these things Palero is selling should have plenty of HP for video viewtopic.php?f=8&t=3440" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

1U rackmount servers? Hope you have a lotta desk space and don't mind fan noise,

Aaron Goldsmith wrote:

Kurt Rahn wrote:If you're a PC guy and you're still looking, these things Palero is selling should have plenty of HP for video viewtopic.php?f=8&t=3440" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

1U rackmount servers? Hope you have a lotta desk space and don't mind fan noise,

Hey, those are the trade-offs for that much processing power at under $200.

Aaron Goldsmith wrote:

Kurt Rahn wrote:If you're a PC guy and you're still looking, these things Palero is selling should have plenty of HP for video viewtopic.php?f=8&t=3440" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

1U rackmount servers? Hope you have a lotta desk space and don't mind fan noise,

Just put them in their own climate-controlled sound-proof room with the halon fire suppression and UPS.

Don't forget the earthquake reinforced four-bar rack! BTW, halon is sooooooooo 80s.