What laptop

[scotty365]

What spec does a laptop need to be for imaging with a toucam pro II. Would a PII with 128Mb mem and a 20 Gb harddrive be enough?

Scotty

[GordonCopestake]

It would probably work but to be honest i wouldn't drop below a P3 as you will likely want to run a recent version of windows. Ideally XP but 98SE would work OK.

[Kaptain Klevtsov]

If it can do USB ports, basically it should work. If you're looking to get one, a parallel port could be a requirement for a modified webcam.

Captain Chaos

[GordonCopestake]

Good advice CC, USB+Parallel pretty much sums it up as any laptop with USB will have enough umph to run a decent version of windows

[Ant]

I would agree with all of that, but if you are going to be stacking AVI's on the fly - stacking the first one while capturing the next you'll something a little stonger.

I have a Celeron 700, with 364MB RAM. The capture in fine - but post processing is a little time consuming.

Ant

[Kaptain Klevtsov]

For the processing I always use a desk type. My PIII laptop is too slow for anything other than capturing (plenty fast enough for that) as I'm very impatient. In the astroshed I use an old Athlon based desktop that got sacked from the office more than a year ago.

I use a 4GB USB memory stick to transfer stuff between the two mainly, as the wifi is too slow.

Captain Chaos

[scotty365]

Ive bought a Compaq with 1.9 GHz Pentium 4 Mobile, 20 Gb HD, 768Mb RAM - Its Blue tooth and WI-FI ( and had all the ports that I might need. Battery last over 2 hours. Paid £200 for it which I thought was quite a bargain looking at some of the other ones being sold.

Have you guys any tips I might need to know, ie. settings to prolong battery - I presume that having less lumination on the screen will help and I hear there are settings for the HD to reduce powers usage.

Thanks Scotty