You could make a P4 laptop fast enough for your needs, with an external
fire wire or USB2 hard drive, lots of ram and some tweaking. I would buy
the fastest P4 laptop I could find, fill it with the maximum amount of RAM
it will hold, have it made with one of the new 5400 RPM 2.5 inch (laptop)
hard drives, and the best NVIDIA GEForce card available for a laptop.
I would remove whatever is on the hard drive when you get it. For a
performance machine, you would probably want to get rid of any proprietary
manufacturer utilities and unwanted software running in the background or
taking up hard drive space. These sorts of applications can be problematic
and performance black holes. All brand name laptops that I have seen, come
with a restore CD(s) that will restore your hard drive back to how it
shipped so you won't be risking anything by trying this.
Format the hard drive, create two partitions, a NTFS for the operating
system (this will help make your laptop secure) and a FAT32 for storage,
apps, and data that don't require a fast hard drive, ...like backup image
files, or mp3 files, or documents, text files this sort of thing. Then
install Win2K or XP Pro ... which would be the best for multimedia use. I
would try to avoid XP Home version or any Dell, Gateway, Compaq whatever
version that ships with your laptop.
Put a external Ultra 100 7200 RPM drive, like the Western Digital 120 meg
Ultra 100 with the 8 meg cache, on a USB2 or Firewire port. Partition this
as one large extended partition with logical drives in it. Make the first
partition 5 gig and put your swap file here....for video work make the
swap file a fixed GB or more. On your second partition make it a 10 GB temp
drive with a temp folder. When programs like Adobe Photoshop, Premier,
Soundforge ask you where you want to put your work or temp directory tell
them to put it on the swap temp folder first, and on the temp partition
second. These will be your fastest partitions. I would then make two FAT32
partitions for the the rest of the drive. The first one to install
applications to and the second one for your audio and video files that you
are working with.
I don't know if the available laptop audio and video would be up to your
needs. You can get a laptop with some kind of GEForce video with at least
32 megs of RAM that should handle any 2D requirement. I would be surprised
if you couldn't get a GEForce4 MX with 64 megs of RAM. For sound you can
get a USB external Sound Blaster Audigy which presently is the pride of
Creative Sound Blaster. ATI makes external USB TV devices.
Get a USB2 hub and lots of other fast devices can plugged into it. Cameras,
scanners, printers midi instruments, you name it. Everything is headed that
way now.
And if it isn't available for USB2 or Firewire it will be for a PCMCIA card.
All modern Laptops, that I have used, allow for plugging a keyboard, mouse
and external monitor directly into the back of them..and it is pretty much
on the fly. Dells work great for this.
Do it like this and you will have yourself a very quick...all be it
expensive... mobile setup.
This would be better and faster then any of the small manufactured
computers I have seen to date like the lunch box or keyboard computers. The
ones I have seen have been basic office machines...not high end multimedia
workstations like you are proposing.
Your other alternative would be to build yourself a computer in something
like a metal craftsman toolbox. The key would be to find the right
motherboard, but I know somebody who did this with a Celeron processor. Of
course that would not be fast enough for your needs.
Another approach would be to use the smallest tower case you can find and
use a transport harness like this
http://www.cyberguys.com/ and do a search for Item# 108 0170
The biggest advantage to building it yourself over the laptop approach, as
described above, is that you will be able to easily upgrade processor,
video, motherboard etc. Repairs will be easy and inexpensive. You can use
any sound card and video you like. However the biggest performance
difference will be that you can use dual processor and 10 to 15000 SCSI
drives. However once you head down that road you will have a cooling
problem that will have to be dealt with. Not easy in a small box. But as
long as noise, size and weight aren't a big issue then you could make this
work.
A dual processor AMD Athlon MP2000 with a couple of Gigs of ram and 15000
RPM Cheeteh drives in a RAID configuration would make for a world class
multimedia workstation..... and it could double as a room heater in the winter!
Rode
The NOSPIN Group
>I'> Would someone know how to build a very small computer? Is it possible to
> > integrate a monitor in this small computer?
> >
> > The reason I need to build one is for audio/video production and the
> > computer will be on the road a lot. Laptops are still not fast enough. So
> > building a small computer (with a handle) would be the best option.
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