Legit Reviews

I have recently started to get into the video editing scene, and I'm quickly finding that my 2007 Dell Notebook isn't quite powerful enough to run Premiere Pro and edit HD content. It's current specs are 2.00 Ghz Dual Core Intel Processors, 2 gigs of memory, a 80 GB 5400 RPM harddrive (I store files on an external), and an Nvidia Gforce Go 7300 128 Mb graphics card. I'm wondering what I can do to upgrade this and improve the performance so that HD editing actually becomes reasonable. So it there anything I can do, or am I better off waiting the year or so until I got to college to buy a new computer?
Thanks.

frogpjb wrote:I have recently started to get into the video editing scene, and I'm quickly finding that my 2007 Dell Notebook isn't quite powerful enough to run Premiere Pro and edit HD content. It's current specs are 2.00 Ghz Dual Core Intel Processors, 2 gigs of memory, a 80 GB 5400 RPM harddrive (I store files on an external), and an Nvidia Gforce Go 7300 128 Mb graphics card. I'm wondering what I can do to upgrade this and improve the performance so that HD editing actually becomes reasonable. So it there anything I can do, or am I better off waiting the year or so until I got to college to buy a new computer?
Thanks.

Pretty much the only thing you can do is replace the laptop so I suggest just waiting until you get to college. Core i7's already available on laptops so those would make for a fairly decent on-the-go video editing machine. Of course, a year from now, there'd be newer, better processors.

There are two things you can do with your current laptop to help process video in Premiere Pro. 1 - Add more RAM. Like Photoshop (most Adobe products) the more RAM the better. 2 - Buy a new hard drive. You can now find 7200RPM drives that support more onboard cache (16MB if memory serves me correctly). To my knowledge Premiere Pro does rudimentary support CUDA but the 7x00 series from nVidia doesn't.