Re: The right notebook computer for after effects

I use a HP NX9420. Its a great laptop. It doesn't have many of the glitzy consumer features, but I didn't want those.

Try and stay away from "consumer" laptops. Also stay away from so called "gaming" laptops, like Alienware. They will run you tons of cash without gaining much performance. (although a laptop with an internal dual HDD setup is not bad)

And stay away from Dell.

If you go to any manufacturer's website they should have a "business" class of notebook. Generally you can get these with out a ton of pre-installed crap like most Dell's and Gateway's and consumer HP laptops come with.

If you do get a "consumer" laptop, the best thing you can do for it is format the harddrive and reinstall windows from scratch, if you can. Lots of "consumer" laptops make it very difficult to install Windows from anything but the system restore disks these days. And those restore disks will put back all the crap that came pre-loaded and broke your computer to begin with.

Almost 100% of PC laptops sit on the shelf BROKEN before you ever buy them because of all the bull droppings they pre-install.

I have owned and operated literaly 100s of laptops over the last 10 years, and my favorites by far are the HP business line. If you don't need the size of the NX9420 17" like I have (very nice for editing, widescreen, 10-key) you can get a smaller verion.

And, an interesting side note, when I bought my first NX9420 its stats matched those of the then new apple macbookpro, and the HP laptop installed OSX86 project no problem. My PC ran Apple OS faster than the new Macs did! In contrast the new Macs ran windows faster than my laptop did. I have several Mac developer friends that I work with all the time, they didn't believe I even got it running, let alone could blow away their apple machines with their own OS! LOL!

But, I can't condone that... not legal since Apple won't let anyone do ANYTHING with their OS other than run it on an apple machine. You can't even run Apple OS in a VM legally.

But my suggestion, after all this: HP business line, or take a look at the "business" class laptops from manufacturs. And my personal opinion of Dell is that they and Gateway are the worst. And Dell makes Alienware, fyi.

Brian Lynn