Laptops

[Jonny]

I would like to know what laptop most are using for the booth. I've done quite a bit of looking and you can buy a new laptop fairly cheap but they don't have serial ports anymore, thanks to the stealthswitch it's not much of an issue.

My problem now is you can't buy a new laptop without it having vista on it and I don't want to use vista. I have used vista and in my opinion it is crap so I would like to stick with WinXP.

What options do I have for starting this up?

Thanks.

[Entwip]

I doubt you will be able to buy a new laptop with Windows XP on these days, I run the app on 2 laptops with Vista and it runs smooth with no issues.

[Jonny]

OK

Cool.

With that out of the way, what laptop?

Brand, specs, etc.

Thanks.

[greggie1]

Micro center has Acer laptos with XP on them. I'm looking at the small ones for $299.00. It has a 9 inch monitor and with three USB ports. You can run an external monitor for you preview scree. I think I'm going to buy one for my next booth.

[Chris Breeze]

PSRemote/DSLR Remote/NKRemote should run fine on any PC which is capable of running Windows XP or Vista but the processor speed will affect the time it takes to prepare the images for printing at the end of the photobooth sequence. Many of the new "netbook" laptops have 1.6GHz Intel Atom processors which will take significantly longer to process the images than a laptop with a basic 1.6GHz Intel Core Duo processor. You can compensate for this to some extent by setting the camera to a lower resolution setting (e.g. medium or small JPEGs).

[Jonny]

I'm looking at one with an Intel Pentium M 2.13GHz which is the Centrino processor. A bit older I think, will this work?

Thanks.

[Chris Breeze]

I've used a 5 year old Sony 1.6GHz Intel Centrino laptop to run a photobooth for family parties (I only write the software and don't run photobooths professionally) and it was fine.

[Codhod]

Dell Latitude e5500, More expensive but has a serial port and can be ordered with XP, Also Dell offers a dock with about 5 usb ports, 2 dvi ,2 vga, serial and several other connectors in it. I keep the dock mounted in my booth and just pop the laptop in and out, works really slick. (the dock works great for having multiple monitors without haveing to use cheezy dongles etc.)

[jonmonts]

http://www.toshibadirect.com

Go there and click on the graphic at the bottom that says "still looking for XP?"

The selection changes pretty regularly, so if you don't see something that you like, just check back in. You can't go wrong with a Toshiba laptop.