1st laptop - Re-install question

Hi,
i'm new in this forum and never had a laptop but heard that it is not easy to get rid of all useless things and spy/ad-wares put by the manufacturer in the first place as a result of marketing deals. So i'm willing to buy one (a powerful and lightweight one able to encode video non-stop all day- is it possible ?- to replace my desktop) when i can reformat the HDD, re-install the OS as well as all drivers coming with that particular model's peripherals.

Could you please tell me if there is any how-to guide with general guidelines and/or guides for particular brands, etc... to reformat, reinstall the OS and all delivered peripherals' drivers ?

many thanks

 

If you want to encode movies I wouldn't be looking at a laptop unless the size thing is important to you. Getting a cheap quadcore PC is a much better option. Way faster and less expensive. But to your question it is possible to have your laptop encodeing 24/7.

Now to re-install its quite simple.

1st thing I'd do is goto the manufacturers website & download all the newest drivers for teh laptop and its periferals and put them on a memory stick or external hard drive.

Next backup any important stuff you might want to keep if there is any.

3rdly time to format and install. If your installing windows XP or Vista its really simple. Basically you put the disc in (Not the disc that came with teh laptop preferably a proper MS one or a copy of a proper MS one you can download teh Vista img from MS I belive and burn your own). When you restart your laptop press whatever button it says to open the boot menu on a Dell this is F12 but can vary with diffrent manufacturers. A boot menu will come up and select CD/DVD drive.

4th is going though the installation which is as simple as telling it what coutry your in what laguage you want, setting the time and putting in a name and password to make yourself an account.

5th once windows boots for the 1st time and finishes doing its stuff its probably a good idea to start installing those drivers you downloaded before. So plug in your memory stick or external drive and start installing. I normally start with chipset drivers then graphics and then whatever else you have to do normally audio, wireless, touchpad, webcam if there is one and whatever else your laptop might have. Once they are all installed go about installing the applications you want and then go about your computing happily.

On a note make sure you get the ethernet driver, or networking drivers. In my experiance they are teh most important becasue once thats working properly you can download the others but if you don;t have networking then its very hard to download anything.

Hope that helps

 

Thank you very much for this detailed instruction
few more questions below please.

I though that laptops come with a manufacturer CD/DVD having all these stuff; i completely agree that a clean XP/Vista (not OEM from manufacturer) must be installed but aren't the drivers delivered on a special CD/DVD or are they on the same CD/DVD as for the OS ? If this is the case, is it possible (simply) to take them there and not to get them on their sites ? As you said one may forget something and/or take a wrong version etc.

I usually use Norton Ghost to backup my OS (in order to not re-install) in case of hard/soft failure and it works wonderfully fine. I suppose it must also work on laptops with an external USB disk ?

Is it possible to boot a laptop from an external USB disk ?

If i buy a laptop, the first reason would be the size so i'm not gonna buy a thing called "desktop replacement" invented by the marketing guys!

So this being said, the question is if it is possible to do what i do with my desktop i.e. let it work all day ( i just turn it off to sleep) and encoding my family videos as i take them i.e. estimated average of 1 hour of video per week; of course some days i may be encoding 3/4 hours.

I heard that marketing guys invented a new classification: "students" which is not a gaming station but a powerful one; what do you think ?

 

um your going to need a CPU that runs at 2Ghz or more
reformatting your notebook, well its actualy a personal perference actualy depending on the notebook you gotten, the manufacter could have put in specfic programs or settings to optimize your notebook. You should check on the reviews on your notebook to see if is worth it

Also its worth concidering a notebook cooler to keep temperatures low

 

i seriousely doubt that a manufacturer show you what specific programs to install if you're about reformatting and reinstalling just because its marketing deal will be void. If that wasn't the case all you would need was a CD for the OS (or your own original one) and a specific CD containing the rest (drivers and specifics) while as long as i know you're just given a restore CD/DVD that will put the laptop as it was preinstalled i.e. with all those garbages.

As for the temperatures i agree that the laptop must not get hot. As a matter of fact, i respect this for anything in computer world e.g. HDD; if this is getting too hot (even if the manufacturer says it's normal), you're having big problems sooner rather than later. I pay far more attention to the temp/power/watts/Amperes/... than to speed, $/GB, etc.

However it's out of the question to buy a cooling gadget complementing the laptop. If these days laptops aren't ready for what i want, well i'll wait another few years !
nalooti

 

actualy for my asus Power 4 gear actualy limits my cpu and has profiles designed for it and they work in conjunction with NPC so in an essence yes it does lol. Well its true there are bloatware on the PC but there also some programs that people find usefull that optimize your notebook by how it functions and how you want it to function. And stock drivers arnt always the best since drivers are open source people make changes for them so they perform better and even cooler. I know personaly using Ati tray tools i can push out more FPS and consume less energy then normal

if you also agree that temperatures must not get hot then you must understand that poor little fan with the 2 heatpiples cant do all the work, while undervolting and other methods reduce the heat it consumes there is still excessive amount of heat. But you got to take this advice with some logic if your notebook performs cool as is then there is no point to makeing it cooler but if your running 15"+ with a dediacated GPU i really reccomend it

 

To answer your question from above the reason i would not use the disk that come with the laptop is becasue it includes things the manufacturer has put on there. This is becasue normally there is stuff like some anti virus trial or something included that you probably don't want and would just have to uninstall it afterwards anyways. and secondly becasue even though their disc has the drivers they are the driver version that was current when they made the cd. by downloading new ones from the net you get the newest versions which is better anyways.

Following my instructions you end end up with a nice new clean install with only things you want & nothing else. Plus you have the newest versions of all the drivers which is normally a good thing.

The booting of an external hard drive is possible on some laptops but not others but give it a go if you want and see it can't hurt to try .

Also yep you can use a laptop for what you want if your only doing a few hours of video a week its perfect. But from your original post i thought you might be doing alot more and in that case you want something as fast as you can get being a PC (I was encoding about 40 hours of vid a week for awhile and it would of taken forever on anything else)

 

Thanks again, my notes below

that would be cool if i knew which laptops let you boot from external usb hdd!

but isn't it something to have with bios; i believe the standard way to do it is under work according to microsoft site; anyway nothing has prevented people to do it themselves before standards come out!
that would be great if someone has a how-to guide

well, it depends on when; actually after vacations i also may encode videos all day (say an average of 3/4 hours per day) while in regular time i have no video to encode;
i do it now with my p4/3Ghz desktop and the problem is that i have no idea how to compare it with new dual/quad core processors; frequency alone is not enough;
so my guess is if today dual core processors are as fast as my few years old pentium 4 (which is probably true even for notebook's low end processors), i can replace my desktop with a decent laptop.
however the equation is not that simple because doing that is only meaningful if portability is fully there which means my laptop would not be a big heavy "desktop replacement" category that i could hardly move; it should have the following properties:

- display size <= 14" widescreen
- lightweight
- powerful enough for above encoding at reasonable time
- quiet and cool operation (getting hot means troubles soon, not for me)
- real usb powered ports (for external hdd)
- graphic not for gamin but enough to watch action movies in mpeg2, DivX and why not h264 AVC (mpeg4) which demands high cpu utilization
- good battery runtime

so the question is can i go laptop now or should i wait more

regards
nalooti

 

What are you encoding into & i'll tell you how fast it will go.

I personally encode into h.264 becasue its the best quality to size codec i have found. and on a 2ghz Core 2 Duo you should see encode speed of about 7.5 to 8 fps with the slowest (best quality/most complex) profile/settings which is very respectable. If you don;t require teh best possible quality at the smallest size you can drop teh profile back 1 step which will see a 5% bigger file for teh same quality but twice the encode speed and if you don;t mide a little more size again drop back another step for another 3% file size but another 50% gain in speed. And you would be getting nearly 25fps (real time) encoding on a very complicated/slow codec at DVD resolution (720/576).

In comparison to your old 3Ghz P4 it can probably get about 3fps on the slowest profile. So a 2Ghz Core 2 duo is more than twice as fast (they are quite awesome at this stuff)

But if you wanna know pretty exact numbers tell me what res you will be encoding & what into & ill tell you an aprox speed.

And for teh last minute you can get a laptop that does exatcly what you want. The new dell 1420 is a good canditate (fast CPU, small size, lots of ram if you want, can have intergrated or dedicated graphics, good battery life, fairly light i think). but there are lost of diffrent ones on teh market that would do what you want. Make a post in teh what shoudl i buy section and someone will list a few to look at becasue im no expert on whats out there :s.

But if you want to watch h.264 movuies a dedicated gfx card can be very nice as it takes strain of teh CPU for you.

 

Thanks very much for the answers; see below please

i'm encoding video files taken with my Canon Powershot S80. The original files are in Mjpeg format and i'm converting them to DivX because right now if i encode them in h264, i couldn't watch them on my standalone DVD/DivX player and i want them to watch in my living room not just on my PC; can you watch your h264 movies on a standalone player ???

I'm confused; are you saying that real-time encoding (25fps) is the best we can have (and not even with the best quality) ? but with what processors and what frequency ?

That's great; so i have nothing to lose in term of performance if i switch to a laptop right now;
I searched on the net for processor comparison but didn't find a simple way to compare Pentium-based processors with the new Core2 Duo-based ones;

ok, i'm encoding the original Mjpeg files out of my camera; they have 1024x768 resolution but since this is a high definition format i convert them to Divx with 648x480 resolution so i can watch them on my TV. Of course i keep the original Mjpeg files and i'll convert them to HD (Divx or h264), the day i have the right stuff in my living room to watch them in hi res.
I use the quantizer 4 in one pass Divx6. I use VirtualDub to do it.

Again i'm confused; do you say that without a dedicated graphic card i'll not read them or just that the cpu usage will be high ? if the cpu usage is high i don't know why shoul i care because i'm watching a movie and can't do anything other (oh yeh i could encode in the background at the same time!);

anyway, in one of the posts i read that a dedicated graphic card needs fan and cooling systems; my first impression is that if it gets that hot i'm not gonna get it; reasonable heat when the fans aren't too loud can be ok but i definitely prefer a cool system with less performance; it's a compromise;

on another topic, do you know a way to boot XP from an external USB hard drive ?

thanks
nalooti

 

Ok im going to start a bit bacwards. But with dedicated graphics the graphics card is able to process most of the file instdead of teh CPU so you get say 2 - 5% CPU useage instead of 40% CPU useage. But its upto you becasue it will play anyways.

With h.264 encoding on teh slowest/bestquality for size setting real time encoding is definitaly the best possible at the moment. I do it multithreaded on a quad core 3.2Ghz and I only just get real time (thats all 4 cores going at 100%). But like I said if teh compression isn't that important to you. You can get the same quality file for an extra 5% file size and double that speed. Or with a little more file size approx 3% you can get another boost.

So basically if you don't need the file compressed as much as it possibly can be you get about 3 times the speed for only an 8% bigger file (The quality will be the same). Which means I can encode 3 times faster than real time but I prefer to make the files as small as possible. You have to realize that a file with teh same quality in DivX would be 30% or more bigger. And as with all compression you get diminishing returns eg double the time to process does not equal double the compression.


Now for how long it will take to encode certain things. If you want to encode your source 1024 x 768 in the best compression/slowest mode into h.264 you will probably end up getting about 3.2 FPS with a bitrate of 2000kbps. So will be 900Mb for an hour of video at that resolution. But if you step teh compression back a bit and change the bitrate to 2160kbps you will end up with the same quality but it will encode at 10 FPS and your final file would be 972Mb per hour of video. Of course you can keep improving file encode speed at the cost of file size as much as you want its just upto what suits you.

If you were to do the exact same in h.264 but downsizing to 640 x 480 you can decrease filesize by 2.5 times and increase encode by 2.5 times. So somthing like 390Mb an hour at a speed of 25 FPS.

I'm not an expert on DivX but im going to encode some movies in it tonight to test speed out for you and i'll report with results tomorrow for you.

But I would be guessing that you could multiply the encode speed by 3 or so but increase the filesize but a bit if you want to keep the quality.

 

Hi,
would you please check something for me?
I'd like to know when you encode (or whenever cpu usage is high - say 90-100% do you hear fans accelerating and becoming noisy ?
How about when CPU usage is low but the graphical processor on your graphical card usage is high?
Your results come from a desktop i think (quad core 3.2 GHz); do you have a laptop for the same encoding test ?
thanks
nalooti