What kind of laptops do today's KJs use/recommend?

[ntepb]

Hi everyone. Sorry I haven't been around the past couple of weeks. Just got done visiting lots of family and going back to my day job (working the graveyard shift. Grrr...)

But during my time away, my friend was able to get a couple of older laptops from another friend of his, so I've had the chance to test them with the demo version of Hoster.

The Toshiba M55-S3512 works perfectly with what I'm trying to accomplish with Hoster, including dual-display with S-video. The only bad part is that the internal CD/DVD drive doesn't read CD+G discs. Oh well...we'll just look into getting an external CD drive along with external hard drives to keep it company.

The Dell Inspiron 1200 doesn't have any real expandability to do anything useful with Hoster (no S-video port, no docking station capabilities, etc.). I could (in theory) try to get a 2nd video card installed in the PC Card slot - yes, they do exist - to get S-video output, but I think that takes too much effort compared to what's available now.

And a quick note to billyo :

I would tend to agree with bobcox on the video issue - check the drivers. Make sure that EVERYTHING is set to NTSC (or PAL if you are in most parts of Europe); if you're using the ATI Catalyst drivers, check everything 10 times over because one little setting could throw everything off on the secondary monitor. I learned this after beating my head against the wall trying to figure this out with my ATI AIW 2006 card.

Another test you could try is this...if you have a TV with S-video input, try connecting your computer directly to the TV via S-video cable (no RCA). See if the S-video output works correctly - if so, you're having an issue with the RCA adapter; if not, it's most likely a driver setting/issue.

(Sorry...I should start another thread for this, shouldn't I?)

Thanks again for your input, everyone! Let's keep this going...my friend is looking now to get quite a few laptops running for his shows (he just loves backup machines ).

Jon